91–100 of 148 posts
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 comp…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Sorry if you took it personally or you think this is a rant. This is clearly not the case, I can repeat it, PM have a lot of value, but there is one specific area that we shouldn't give them control over. It doesnt mean they are bad PM or good PM, innovation requires just fundamentally opposed skills to the standard product management ones that we see in books.
This is a bit like encountering an engineer who isn’t very good (or maybe it’s just a lack of experience) and then concluding that the engineering org should not be allowed to control architecture based on that experience.
Or encountering a dev team who goes off and builds some complex feature that no one asked for and then concluding that dev teams should never have a say in what should be built.
The existence of bad PMs or bad devs (or good PMs/devs executing a misguided plan) shouldn’t be used to justify a general sweeping argument about either discipline.
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…
I am a PM who used to be an engineer and eng manager. In my engineering life, in retrospect I did PM work too - ie, orient my teams work to highest value as expressed in financial and user impact terms.
The eng/PM split is an unfortunate outcome of the fact that many engineers and engineering leads aren't capable of thinking in practical business terms, and so they need a PM in the mix to steer the ship.
The problem starts not when you get a PM but when your engineers need one.
For what it's worth, I find being a mix of the two really optimal - I am still capable of having hardcore technical discussion even as my focus is on the business, but I was doing that from the engineering seat as well.
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
I’ve seen this in dealing with Microsoft. Product Managers at these companies all have a type A personality in general. If you want excessive politics and everyone fighting and being a dumb ass it’s the product managers at big companies. I’m not sure if product managers at small companies and startups act this way. At the larger companies the people who spend all their time fighting for power seem to be product manag…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
This article is pretty wrong, but look at the upvotes. It obviously speaks to a lot of people. I think it says more about the disconnect between dev and product, than the actual sins of product people.
> Take your most competent sales person and put him in charge of the product.
Didn't read article but can react to headline. I am a PM who used to be an engineer and eng manager. In my engineering life, in retrospect I did PM work too - ie, orient my teams work to highest value as expressed in financial and user impact terms. The eng/PM split is an unfortunate outcome of the fact that many engineers and engineering leads aren't capable of thinking in practical business terms, and so they need…
> There is a famous quote about Henry Ford “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. Innovation is not something you see in the data. It is someone that has intuition and most people disagree with. When you start by saying “Let's look at the data and talk to users and we will build what we see”. You are basically saying “Let’s not innovate but work on the most visible issues”.
Which actually is an indictment of, as you describe, "thinking in practical business terms".