Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers

blog.luap.info

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 148 posts

Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers

#81

Post by brianwawok »

polote wrote: post #9
nandorsky wrote: post #7

This is a poorly written article that is all over the place. It’s evident the author had a horrible experience with a PM. Their description of a PM is a description of a PM who’s doing their job poorly. Qualitative research at any company is critical and poor qual research (interviewing the wrong people, asking the wrong types of questions, etc) will yield poor insights as is the case here. Any PM working at a B2B st…

Well I agree that this is poorly written (I wrote it). The point of the article is not that companies shouldnt have PM, but that you shouldnt make them owner of the innovation in a B2B context. Of course if you start with the assumption of "Good PMs" it will work, but you will rarely find these "good PMs"

I think the article had some good points.

I’ve had the same b2b PM woes. I even had my PM tell someone that they (the PM) didn’t really need to know how to use our product, as long as they talked to users and wrote down what they wanted into stories.

I have since taken back more product owner power as founder. Innovation is up again! So I think it’s helping.

Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers

#82

Post by LatteLazy »

I've wondered in the past if product management (especially for externally facing functionality) is too much to ask for one person:

* You need someone very technical to understand the engineering aspects

* You need someone politically and socially astute for the internal politics and prioritisation

* You need someone who actively knows the market, clients, prospects and competitors

Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers

#83

Post by xbar »

llamaLord wrote: post #58
polote wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I agree that this is poorly written (I wrote it). The point of the article is not that companies shouldnt have PM, but that you shouldnt make them owner of the innovation in a B2B context. Of course if you start with the assumption of "Good PMs" it will work, but you will rarely find these "good PMs"

In this whole article the word "problem" is only written once, and it's in the line "the problem with product managers is". Given you don't understand that the core pillar of the product manager role is to be the owner of the problem space, I'm not sure how qualified you are to comment on how valuable our role is or isn't. Discovery isn't about decided what does or doesn't get built, it's about discovering what the r…

> A lot of PM's end up overreaching because they're just tired of there being a leadership vacuum and nobody willing to fill it.

This kind of apologizing for horrific behavior undermines what I thought were otherwise strong points.

Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers

#84

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

switch007 wrote: post #12

Why has every product person I've worked with been obsessed with controlling teams and communication rather than obsessing over the customer and the market? Friends say the same thing too. It makes me roll my eyes whenever someone retorts "you just need to hire the /good/ PMs" Even my worst sales/tech colleagues, I've never had as much conflict and annoyance as with product people

Every product person I’ve ever worked with in depth has been obsessed over the customer and the market, and if anything they tend to get frustrated when circumstances require them to think about internal communication instead. I don’t know where the gap comes from but I can testify that the good PMs people are telling you about do exist.

Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers

#85

Post by le-mark »

polote wrote: post #9
nandorsky wrote: post #7

This is a poorly written article that is all over the place. It’s evident the author had a horrible experience with a PM. Their description of a PM is a description of a PM who’s doing their job poorly. Qualitative research at any company is critical and poor qual research (interviewing the wrong people, asking the wrong types of questions, etc) will yield poor insights as is the case here. Any PM working at a B2B st…

Well I agree that this is poorly written (I wrote it). The point of the article is not that companies shouldnt have PM, but that you shouldnt make them owner of the innovation in a B2B context. Of course if you start with the assumption of "Good PMs" it will work, but you will rarely find these "good PMs"

I don’t get all this criticism. It’s a rant, I personally enjoy a good rant so thanks! Now everyone saying you don’t understand the role? Hogwash, most companies and their management are incompetent and don’t understand the role either, they simply hobble along on their “chaos is a process” BS. I read this as one of those. It happens, a lot.

Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers

#86

Post by jt2190 »

There is an anti-pattern I’ve seen at many companies I’ve worked for over the years: I’ll call it the “No-longer-in-touch customer proxy”.

Sometimes this is a Product Manager, but just as often it’s a VP, or someone in Sales, or someone in Customer Support. It can even be multiple people, who all echo and amplify each other’s description of what the customer really wants.

It’s a very easy pit to fall into once a company has some success: Everyone’s busy, the product has a clear direction, and the customers are paying. There’s a lot of unglamorous work to be done, but it’s much more fun to go off into a room and work on “design” or “vision” for weeks and months. Any attempt to bring reality into the is met with “This is what the customer wants.”

This can go on for years, especially at profitable companies.

Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers

#88

Post by Ialdaboth »

le-mark wrote: post #85
polote wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I agree that this is poorly written (I wrote it). The point of the article is not that companies shouldnt have PM, but that you shouldnt make them owner of the innovation in a B2B context. Of course if you start with the assumption of "Good PMs" it will work, but you will rarely find these "good PMs"

I don’t get all this criticism. It’s a rant, I personally enjoy a good rant so thanks! Now everyone saying you don’t understand the role? Hogwash, most companies and their management are incompetent and don’t understand the role either, they simply hobble along on their “chaos is a process” BS. I read this as one of those. It happens, a lot.

Yep. It's no longer a rant when a recognizable pattern emerges.

(and I don't think they are personnally incompetent - quite the contrary; but in my experience, it's the managerial process that is often designed to generate incompetency as a side-product)

Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers

#89

Post by munchbunny »

ajot wrote: post #56
dchuk wrote: post #10

As soon as an article states you can use “product manager” and “project manager” interchangeably, you can immediately assume the author has no idea what they’re talking about. Convenient this article did that early on, saves everyone a lot of time.

What are these two roles about? What differentiates them? Asking genuinely as someone not in the tech sector.

Within the tech sector, project management refers to the set of competencies and tasks around coordinating projects - a lot of stuff around task tracking, reporting progress, unblocking problems that come up, and so on. Product management refers to a set of competencies and tasks for making sure you're building the right thing to solve the right problem. Tasks like conducting market research, user research, and crunching product metrics/analytics generally fall more on the "product" side than "project" side.

The actual boundaries tend to be a bit fuzzy because a lot "product management" comes down to doing whatever the team needs in order to make sure a good product is delivered, and by necessity product managers often do a substantial amount of project managing.

Typically you'll see people conflating "program management" and "product management" in tech. You don't usually see "project management" in that mix since that tends to refer to a more industry agnostic discipline.

Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers

#90

Post by thewellis2 »

In the startups I've worked at, where they start hiring in product people, the point in time that normally happens it that critical t0 point. Basically, where the innovation will have to slow down, because you need to stop thinking about just coding the solution but start on the build pipelines, tests, infra, support, analytics, feedback loops... And yes, you can think of these things on day one, but it is that point, t0, where you need to actually have those things defined (even if it's simply a wikipage that has"No" written on it). And that is the point of bringing in a PM.

The worst PMs I've worked for aren't the ones who stifle innovation. The worst are the ones who encourage it to increase the feature factory appearance to make their own CVs look good. The best ones gather and present the data to inform the decision that the team has to make.

But in terms of power, yes there needs to be an emphasis on them being facilitators of the conversation and not the decision-makers. As Devs (QA, DevOps, SRE etc) we need to make sure that it isn't a one sided decision and learn to argue without undermining or name-calling.

Post reply on HN