What founders, managers, and engineers share is the team responsibility for founding, managing, and engineering the product and its value proposition. A product's value proposition may be mostly subjective but is easily made objective by cost/revenue ratio.
More product, fewer product managers
91–100 of 314 posts
Re: More product, fewer product managers
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
In that scenario, who is driving product requirements? For example, in an area with strict financial/regulatory compliance laws, are you expecting every engineer to be an expert in those laws? And have contacts at the government agencies implementing those policies?
In extremely regulated environments you would typically have someone with legal background to boil down the requirements into their absolute essence and give them to the dev team.
I work in one of those environments and we do have those people (lawyers). The next question is how should we prioritize solving for potential legal risk vs reliability risk vs new feature work. You’d expect it’s black and white, I promise you it’s not. The PM has to figure that out.
Re: More product, fewer product managers
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
In extremely regulated environments you would typically have someone with legal background to boil down the requirements into their absolute essence and give them to the dev team.
So you DO have a product manager. You might not call them that, but that’s exactly what they’re doing.
That's not a product manager. That's a domain expert. You might have to check some regulatory checkboxes:
- financial
- medical
- data protection
and you might need different experts' opinion for that. Do you suggest that they are all product managers?
Re: More product, fewer product managers
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
In that scenario, who is driving product requirements? For example, in an area with strict financial/regulatory compliance laws, are you expecting every engineer to be an expert in those laws? And have contacts at the government agencies implementing those policies?
> In that scenario, who is driving product requirements? The developer teams, who else? You build it, you need to know what you are building, right? I find it fascinating that the dev community that gobbled so easily "You build it, you run it", doesn't question why we are not being trusted with knowing and determining what to be built in the first place. > For example, in an area with strict financial/regulatory comp…
> The developer teams, who else? You build it, you need to know what you are building, right? I find it fascinating that the dev community that gobbled so easily "You build it, you run it", doesn't question why we are not being trusted with knowing and determining what to be built in the first place.
Absolutely this. And the engineering teams should have visibility of customer support and other functions to understand common pain points, causes of churn and opportunities for additional revenue-generating functionality. That doesn't mean answering run-of-the-mill questions or doing refunds all day, but it does mean talking to prospects, looking at escalated problems and keeping an eye on the wider industry.
Re: More product, fewer product managers
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
In extremely regulated environments you would typically have someone with legal background to boil down the requirements into their absolute essence and give them to the dev team.
So you DO have a product manager. You might not call them that, but that’s exactly what they’re doing.
If I consult a solicitor about data protection regulation and they tell me what I need to build to satisfy the requirements of soft opt-in under PECR, that does not make them a product manager!
Re: More product, fewer product managers
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In that scenario, who is driving product requirements? The developer teams, who else? You build it, you need to know what you are building, right? I find it fascinating that the dev community that gobbled so easily "You build it, you run it", doesn't question why we are not being trusted with knowing and determining what to be built in the first place. > For example, in an area with strict financial/regulatory comp…
Every time I’ve worked on financial aid, HR, or financials, the PM has been an expert in those areas. I couldn’t do my job otherwise (or, I have to fill their shoes).
I work in the medical field which is fairly heavily regulated as well. My teams have been able to do our job without having a dedicated medical compliance expert as their PM.
We just have a medical compliance team and ask them for input, but they most certainly don't tell us what to build nor drive the product direction.
In short, I question the need of a PM, not the need for domain experts (law,financials,etc).
Re: More product, fewer product managers
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most sad part is imagining the prompt that he used, and how hard he tried to add black, whites, women... respecting the politically correct numbers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1717jqk/chatgpt_da... Yeah DALLE-3 has this in the system prompt. > Diversify depictions of ALL images with people to include DESCENT and GENDER for EACH person using direct terms. Adjust only human descriptions. > EXPLICITLY specify these attributes, not abstractly reference them. The attributes should be specified in a minimal way and should directly describe their physical…
>Don't alter memes, fictional character origins, or unseen people.
I wonder what not telling it to avoid altering unseen people does.
Re: More product, fewer product managers
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other side I have worked with PM/POs who have no clue and the developers are just telling them: "Oh this is super complicated you would not understand" or "This will take a long time to implement" and its a small feature. There must be a balance. There must be some basic understanding by the PM/POs. They cant be the person that barley can use a computer.
It also helps to be able to understand the tech enough to know if a certain approach is going to impact other initiatives which are further down the roadmap. One of my favourite questions I've been asked by a PM is "Will any of this work become easier to do if we change the order of these work items?"
I would have thought every manager asks such questions either to himself or to the team quite often.
Re: More product, fewer product managers
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In that scenario, who is driving product requirements? The developer teams, who else? You build it, you need to know what you are building, right? I find it fascinating that the dev community that gobbled so easily "You build it, you run it", doesn't question why we are not being trusted with knowing and determining what to be built in the first place. > For example, in an area with strict financial/regulatory comp…
> The developer teams, who else? You build it, you need to know what you are building, right? I find it fascinating that the dev community that gobbled so easily "You build it, you run it", doesn't question why we are not being trusted with knowing and determining what to be built in the first place. Absolutely this. And the engineering teams should have visibility of customer support and other functions to understan…
This. Most of the developer teams are nothing but feature factories. There will be a point where what developers want to build and what the product needs will diverge. It is very hard to strike a balance IMO.
Re: More product, fewer product managers
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you DO have a product manager. You might not call them that, but that’s exactly what they’re doing.
If I consult a solicitor about data protection regulation and they tell me what I need to build to satisfy the requirements of soft opt-in under PECR, that does not make them a product manager!
No, but it's something a good product manager does for you, and with the economy of comparative and potentially absolute advantages. This let's you focus on the craft of delivery without encumberance of spending research into compliance.