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

180 points by polote 4y ago

al2o3cr 4y ago
LOL somebody's PM told them to stay on task and stop making up features out of thin air
bkfh 4y ago
> The consequence of that is interviewing users in B2B is almost useless, and taking decisions from what users tell you is a severe error and in most cases the path to stagnation. Who would come up with such a nonsense? Regardless of B2C or B2B, knowing what your users need solved is crucial, irrelevant who eventually the buyer is (user vs Manager)
- memen 4y ago
  The issue with B2B is that the decision makers are not the users of the product. You need to convince the decision makers first, as otherwise you'll not sell. Hopefully, the decision makers value user requirements as well.
  - magicalhippo 4y ago
    In my experience with B2B, the higher-ups don't really know what's actually needed by the company. Just one step up the ladder and important operational details are lost. This is why we strive to talk to the actual users as well, to understand what the company really needs. Some companies are worse than others, but I've got many examples of how the team manager, and everyone above, was unaware of essential procedures performed by users, sometimes even on a daily basis. Without which operations would grind to a halt. Similarly I also have many examples of companies where the higher-ups selected a competitor without considering their users, and it all ending in tears as the product couldn't do what was actually needed for daily operations. Most of them struggle for a while to make it work, before pulling the plug and coming to us.
shalmanese 4y ago
You need to be talking to Users, Customers and Stakeholders and be clear about which is which. And if you just build what a user tells you to build, then you’re not a very good PM. Users are not designers, you go to users to get an understanding of what the problems are but users communicate problems in terms of solutions so a good PM uses the proposed solution to understand the problem and then creates a solution that actually solves that problem.
huksley 4y ago
It is because product managers should only be hired at the company after post product-market fit. And they innovate usually not in creating the new product, but improving the existing one, or identifying the possible new product to be created.
- user_named 4y ago
  At an early stage startup the founders are the product managers, and if they are bad at it, they won't get funding or revenue.
nandorsky 4y ago
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 startup not understanding the complexities of how the buyer and users differ and asking questions such as, “Would you use this feature?” is a poor PM. Don’t let one bad experience ruin your perception of the role.
- polote 4y ago
  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"
  - jayparth 4y ago
    Paul, it’s a bad article. Your arguments don’t make sense and are mostly strawmen. If you want to improve it, show it to someone in real life and have them talk over it with you. You’ll probably get a lot farther than a few sentences of feedback over the internet. But it’s really bad.
  - passwordoops 4y ago
    100% what others are saying. This is a hot take rant with bad arguments based on an experience with a bad product manager (or maybe you're just difficult to work with and your ideas aren't as innovative or as good as you think). I can easily flip the script and say "Devs at B2B shouldn't be anything more than oompah-loompahs" or "UI designers shouldn't be allowed to give ideas" based on a couple of my own isolated experiences. You want to be taken seriously? Don't rant and explain what structure/methods would be more appropriate for a B2B business that would balance the need for innovation that makes users happy with keeping the paying gatekeepers willing to keep paying
  - 4y ago
rokkk 4y ago
This post makes some wild assumptions, like the fact that B2B PMs only interview customers, and not end users. Also, that they mostly build what people are saying they want to have. Ironically, avoiding assumptions is the basis of product management. At the end of the day, someone has to do the product role on the team. If the founder can scale that, great, and if the engineers can do it, even better! Unfortunately both options are extremely rare to find. There are a lot of shitty PMs out there, just as there are a lot of shitty engineers or any other job function.. We would do better, I think, to discuss and promote better patterns, than trying to discredit a whole profession by clumsily reverse engineering a handful of gross assumptions and, probably, bad personal experiences.
- diceduckmonk 4y ago
  > There are a lot of shitty PMs out there, just as there are a lot of shitty engineers or any other job function Indeed, both can create negative value for a project. At least with engineers, we have slightly better proxies for interviewing. Leetcode sucks but it does filters out people who can’t code or grasp recursion. Unfortunately, the source of resentment towards Leetcode is that it also filters out people who can code in a practical setting (false negatives). While false positives are increasingly common with Leetcode now that tech is lucrative and people know how to play the game, people who pass Leetcode interviews can program in some capacity
dchuk 4y ago
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.
- tchock23 4y ago
  This, plus if you see them mentioning the Henry Ford ‘quote’ about horses you can reliably close the browser tab because they’re about to build a straw man argument against doing basic customer/user research.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Isn't it nice that those meme-like anecdotes, or whatever they are exist? Other examples are the Maginot Line in WW2, Amazon was never profitable, ERP systems suck because of their sales reps playing golf with their clients...
  - meany 4y ago
    Interesting, I’ve always thought of this quote justifying deeper user research than just asking users what they want, not less. I’ve seen people who don’t really understand user needs over index on what they say they want versus deeply understanding their workflow and needs.
    - llamaLord 4y ago
      The quote is designed to make you understand that building products is about understanding problems, not listening to desired solutions. A PM's job is to be the owner of the "problem space", while the engineering teams job is to be the owners of the "solution space". Fords point was that his customers would only ever tell him about solutions they wanted (faster horse). When in actual fact what mattered to Ford was the problem (current modes of personal transport being expensive, unreliable, uncomfortable, slow, single-person). Any good PM should be able to explain this to you. OP has never worked with a proper PM apparently... Just BA's and Project Managers that wanted a pay bump.
switch007 4y ago
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
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  Because those skills require actual experience and domain-expertice. You can't factory print MBAs that actually give you skills, but you can create the illusion of value by teaching something, so they throw out a bunch of random econ and ways to control employees and everything gets a little bit worse everytime someone graduates
  - testTED 4y ago
    Those with the domain expertise stay away because of this culture.
  - rjbwork 4y ago
    Unfortunately, domain experience is no panacea. Dealing with product people that don't understand technology but do understand the domain is equally as frustrating.
  - perrygeo 4y ago
    This. Some product folks know their industry well and have actual hands-on experience building something in the same ballpark. They are a joy to work with. Even if they don't do their job particularly well, you can ask them real questions and trust them to make reasonable decisions. They have an intuitive sense of what does and doesn't work for the target audience. Product folks who don't have domain experience always seem to fail, no matter how hard they work. Their opinion is not trustworthy on important topics. To compensate for their obvious lack of merit, they HUSTLE. They fall into the trap of crowd-sourcing ideas, insisting on design patterns that make no sense, and micromanaging a project to death with story points. They pathologically avoid any tough decisions (because deep down they know they don't have the skill or knowledge to make them) and prefer to focus on small tractable tickets that they show visible progress. No matter how well they run their processes, their lack of domain experience will almost ensure poor quality.
snupas 4y ago
The whole article seems really juvenile and poorly written.
dandare 4y ago
> And finally if you are really good at taking decisions to make a company successful you will have started a company of your own a long time ago Except this is true of anyone in the company. Unless the author says who is capable of making these really good decisions this article is empty rant.
- Xylakant 4y ago
  The idea that someone that is good at making decisions that make a company successful would always start their own company is wrong on many levels. Running a company is about much more than making a product successful. There’s all the nitty gritty stuff that constantly bogs you down from legal, tax, finance, interpersonal stuff in the company landing on your plate. Some of that can be handed off to an accountant or lawyer, but you still need to learn at least the basics of it to understand what they’re trying to tell you and decide based on that advice. You need access to capital, sometimes a lot. Your risk profile is entirely different than as an employee. Many companies just fail with a total loss. Many people can’t afford a total loss. There’s a strong bias in tech circles to view the outliers that made it from garage to unicorn, but they’re just that: outliers. Don’t make the mistake of considering them the norm.
zhrvoj 4y ago
Product manager - person that screwed up Evernote.
LASR 4y ago
While my experience has lined up with the content of this post, I also think the conclusions only apply to a narrow set of organizations and products. There are a lot of products, especially in enterprise or B2B where the customer is not someone asking for a faster horse. They themselves are innovators and they want something they’ll use and pay for. So there is certainly value in pouring through the data and finding the best value to build next. And for that a PM is pretty important to lead product.
sergioisidoro 4y ago
> If you are a startup B2B founder, I want to give you one piece of advice, don’t ever give a lot of power to product managers as long as you want to innovate. Take your most competent sales person and put him in charge of the product This is much worse. You'll end up doing what individual customers ask, lose product strategy and run the risk of having a guy in sales deciding the next features on the fly during sales meetings, promising stuff just to get that deal signed. Some good points here, but it feels more of a symptom of other problems, like the lack of a tech lead who manages the team (so the PM ends up doing it)
- ghiculescu 4y ago
  It sounds like you haven’t ever worked with a good salesperson. (I realize the irony of this comment.)
politelemon 4y ago
> Second, most product managers are not smart in the sense that they make good product decisions. Anyone can be a product manager, you just need to pretend to know how things work and have done other things in the past. Product managers really rarely evaluate themselves on the KPI they have achieved in the past. And finally if you are really good at taking decisions to make a company successful you will have started a company of your own a long time ago (Not everyone want to create their own company, yes I know, but the high performers do :) ) It's pretty clear that this is the author's view of a PM and not what PMs actually do. It is the premise, and an incorrect one at that, of the entire post. Imagine such hyperbole flipped around and applied to developers, this would be receiving a lot more vitriol.
hahahanononono 4y ago
This is the kind of post a shitty PM would write...
nickdothutton 4y ago
Where to start with this. All I will say is that the job of the Product Manager is if nothing else, to manage the product through the product lifecycle. Concept, development, release, revision, maturity, retirement/death, including likely migration to some new product/service that is a logical replacement. These core duties are most clearly exercised in small product-lead companies. In large firms the job can become very bureaucratic and political as everyone wants to put a hand on the ships wheel, especially if the company is a single-product company. Edited for typo.
rukuu001 4y ago
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.
- spacecadet 4y ago
  Agreed and that hacker news readers may not be any different than the average news consumer, going on title and no content when forming an opinion.
- rib3ye 4y ago
  And if those engineers read to the last line, I think they would pretty surprised at the author’s conclusion: > Take your most competent sales person and put him in charge of the product.
  - ghiculescu 4y ago
    This is great advice. I think people are reacting badly, because they are skipping over the word "competent" and attributing a lot of malice to the word "sales". I think it says more about the disconnect between dev and sales, than the actual sins of sales people.
numlock86 4y ago
The funny part is how the article starts off with how others are missing the point, and then the article continues to completely miss the point. I didn't know you could put that much bias and wrong assumptions into such a few paragraphs.
dohman 4y ago
The writer's trying to argue that product managers aren't useless, but that they have too much power. Okay, sure, but they go about it in the most confusing way possible. They start off by saying that developers who think PMs are useless are missing the point, which is fair, but then they go on this whole tangent about how PMs are actually important because they can help with decision-making and project delivery..? And then they start shitting on PMs, saying that they're not actually that smart and they only like the discovery part of their job where they get to make all the decisions. And to top it off, they say that PMs in B2B companies are useless because they're not actually talking to the people who use the product... That's literally the job of a PM, to talk to customers and figure out what they want. And then they go on to say that if you want to innovate, you shouldn't listen to PMs, but instead put your most competent salesperson in charge of the product. That makes no sense at all. Sadly, as someone else said, I'd assume that this article was driven by poor experiences with a PM in the past. And it's not cool to take a bash at the whole segment due to having a bad experience with someone.
anentropic 4y ago
> What matters is to make your customers happy, and sometimes, and pretty often this is not needed, so all time spent on it is time you will not spend on the most important people, your customers. I don't understand, this seems to say: "all the time spent on making your customers happy is time not spent on your customers" ...huh?
- michaelf77 4y ago
  "it" is what USER wants, as opposite to customer. One of the key takeaways from the article should be that in B2B the customer is often is not the user.
beebmam 4y ago
Devs working directly with customers will always be better than relying on PMs to do it. But it's hard to find devs with the soft skills needed, and are willing to do so.
- user_named 4y ago
  Those people are generally referred to as product managers
  - llamaLord 4y ago
    This guy gets it...
  - klysm 4y ago
    I disagree, is writing code usually part of the product manager role?
  - beebmam 4y ago
    In my experience, most PMs aren't software engineers.
revskill 4y ago
PM to me means communicators. They free developers from doing such social work. Developers in most case is the implementers, not communicators. The issue is, what's the scope of an efficient PM. Should they involve in product development process ? Should they involve in the UX design process ?
- llamaLord 4y ago
  My motto as a PM when talking to my engineering teams is "I go to meetings so that you don't have to" =) They seem to appreciate my sacrifice...
andyish 4y ago
I imagine there's a lot more going on behind the scenes that the author realises. If it's a single product startup a PM will be getting pulled in different directions by sales, marketing, tech, clients and investors. All who have their own agenda, all of whom may want different things. It only sounds like PMs have all the power because they put the tasks in the order that you work on them in, after haggling with all the other stakeholders. I'd guess that the PM in the story trying to get some evidence to backup a decision/convince someone of something.
trollied 4y ago
This article is terrible. Lots of speculation and biased opinion, with absolutely no facts or alternative team structure suggestions. It's more of a rant.
getoffmyyawn 4y ago
As an engineering leader, I tend to agree that giving Product Managers too much power causes lots of problems. A big one is retaining good engineers. My experience of bad PMs is that they live in the Y side of the XY problem space[0] and believe they should have total say over how the engineers and designers spend every minute of their time. Thankfully my company has a great CPO and we have agreed to avoid this type of PM. Anyone who says that the PM should be the Product CEO is not hired. Anyone who says they are the one to define how the engineering teams work is not hired. At a truly tech lead organization, PMs work for the engineering teams, not the other way around. We have some great PMs who collaborate and provide lots of value. 0. https://xyproblem.info/ https://xyproblem.info/
- stakhanov 4y ago
  > At a truly tech lead organization, PMs work for the engineering teams, not the other way around. This reminds me of a company I worked at that had a lot of rhetoric going around inverting the power relationship between teams and their managers. Basically the "project manager" role was renamed into "project advisor", the department manager to departmental advisor and so forth, carrying the connotation that a subordinate might just choose to ignore "advice" from above. In reality, the whole thing was a charade to bullshit people into believing they had more power than they actually had. If someone decided to disagree on any given piece of "advice", they would usually find themselves in a call with the line manager one level up and be told that they were perfectly on track for not getting any salary increase this cycle and no more promotions ever again, because of the arrogance, ignorance, and a dozen other negative personality traits, attributable to anyone who won't follow "advice". This was soo much worse than just having "a boss". If you have a boss, you might just think to yourself "The boss is full of shit, but I'll have to implement it anyway, because that's just how it goes. He has power, I don't." But now there is this whole gaslighting element where you start to question your own reality: "Why does it seem to me right now that the boss is full of shit? Is that because I'm too arrogant to take advice? Is it because I'm too dumb to fully grasp the greater wisdom of his advice?" Once you create a caste such as the "product managerial" caste, it just doesn't matter what you call them, and how you define their role on paper. They are going to be in power. Because there has to be some reason why you chose to distinguish them from the engineers. The article itself seems to reflect some of the bogus beliefs that motivate why engineers can't be their own product managers: Like they are so socially inept that they can't coordinate with relevant stakeholders, and they are so far removed from the customer that they have no way of figuring out by themselves what to build. There also has to be a reason why you chose to distinguish them from the sales people: Like salespeople will just recklessly say "yes" to any and all customer demands with no idea of the cost of actually building stuff. So what's the solution, if you think you have these problems? Apparently, to create a new caste of people. Let's call them "product managers". And because we are calling them something different, those prejudices won't have to apply to them. They won't be socially inept and removed from the customer, because we're not calling them engineers. And they won't be reckless because we're not calling them salespeople. If you hold those beliefs, they are going to be in charge, won't they? Because you've just chosen to think of everyone else in this negative way, and put those project managers up on a pedestal. You've chosen a whole caste of people whose very reason for being is predicated on those negative beliefs about these other groups. And they'll work hard to perpetuate those beliefs, possibly even sabotage the company to make them stay true. They don't even have to be evil to act this way, just human, because is psychologically natural. Hire a full time event manager, and you'll have someone who will constantly be politicking the company into doing events, because, otherwise, why are they here? Hire full time product managers, and you'll have someone who will constantly be politicking the company into not letting engineers and sales people make "product" decisions. The better thing to do is to go back to the original problems and try to solve them: Like, give engineers blocks of time off from coding duty, so they have time to be more proactively communicating with stakeholders. Send them along with a sales person every now and then so they get to talk to customers regularly. Give them time off so they can be trained in usability and design. Let sales people follow along with engineering status updates when you're building a feature that they promised to a customer. So they come to appreciate just how much work it is to actually build stuff. ...now there's no longer a need to have product managers, and you've actually solved problems that were going to cause trouble anyway, regardless of whether you have product managers or not.
fxtentacle 4y ago
The only good PM that I ever met introduced himself like this: My job is to answer product questions when the developers ask me and then confirm those answers with our customers. All those PMs that fancy themselves mind readers in that they believe they can define what the customer needs and what the developers should build, without hearing their perspective first, are just bad managers with a different name.
gregw2 4y ago
Is this phenomena better or worse if you make your tech lead a product manager?
dschuetz 4y ago
What is B2B?
- drbscl 4y ago
  Business to business; making a product that targets businesses rather than consumers
  - 1over137 4y ago
    I do wish article writers would define their acronyms, at least once.
mabbo 4y ago
I don't know what awful experiences this author has had with product managers, but all this article has done is made me appreciate the brilliant PMs I get to work with every day.
drbscl 4y ago
I think this is what separates good from bad PMs. I work with a good PM who gives engineers a bit of room for innovation, and importantly identifies how to productise that innovation.
spacecadet 4y ago
I immediately thought. Tech culture has become... "Im upset. Im going to rage write a blog post. Im going to publish it on another site. Now I somewhat have to manage the blow back." Why? What an overly complex way to vent, but as a "PM", exactly what Ive come to expect. My recommendation would have been to vent to a friend in private, research says "over beer" works best...
evnix 4y ago
Most good software out there were started by engineers and not by product managers and engineer only products are generally great and liked by people. Linux and the ecosystem is one example. I am not sure what really happens after Product Managers come in that the product takes a dive. I have seen this repeat almost everywhere. You start with a small team of engineers and have a product that people love, now you need more engineers and hence you bring in a manager and managers almost always demand to have a product manager and the whole thing devolves into a game of promotion. Doctors are lead by Senior Doctors, Lawyers are lead by Senior lawyers, whereas Engineers need handholding that also sucks the very joy out of engineering. In my opinion, What could be more beneficial is to have Product Managers who also are senior engineers and who atleast do hands-on development 10% of their time. This is exactly how even the senior most doctors still perform surgeries. unless it is customized B2B or B2G, where the engineers are not really interested in the mundane chores of the nitty gritty of a drop-down or having to have constant arguments on what the button should be called, you likely dont need a ProductMgr. The other thing that happens as soon as productMgrs enter is engineers let go of the ownership of the product. The back button doesn't work? well good luck, that was not in the PMs requirements. now raise more unnecessary tickets and show the improved velocity.
- Closi 4y ago
  > Lawyers are lead by Senior lawyers You could argue that Lawyers are lead by their clients in the same way that Engineers are led by their end users / PMs. The difference is that in the Doctor & Lawyer examples your end-user is very obvious because it is the person in-front of you. With Engineering you are not usually in constant contact with your end users, hence the PM role.
  - breckenedge 4y ago
    It’s not quite so obvious in medicine. The patient often isn’t the one paying the bill, so the insurance company or government is the actual customer. In that regards, it’s more like a B2B transaction.
  - htrp 4y ago
    You mean lawyers are led by Partners at the firm.....
fit2rule 4y ago
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achow 4y ago
Though mentions enterprise space (B2B), should mention that in hardware and software consumer product companies the product manager roles does not show much value. Investing in Design+Engg gives maximum return. These two disciplines have other ones around them like project management, overall product owner (PO, General Manager), etc. It is really weird when one sees PMs being mentioned as the one who talks to customers or users. Usually designers were doing that right from beginning, going back to half a century or more..
- breckenedge 4y ago
  I agree that design+engineering is the optimal team structure. For some reason, I’ve found lately that designers don’t want to work with engineers. This happens regardless of whether or not the engineer and designer work in the same office. Because of this, designers come up with prototypes that are more expensive to implement than what is required to meet the customer’s needs. So at some point, engineers have to have awkward conversations with designers about trimming scope. This seems to me why we have PMs: engineers naturally avoid the awkward conversations, build half-fancy things because they have a budget to meet and “it wasn’t in the design,” and no one is happy with the final product. I feel like there is still a better way out there, and I think it involves engineering and design both breaking out of their shells, and that’s where a PM can really help.
christkv 4y ago
I have a theory about when innovation slows down to a crawl. Its the inflection point of where there are too many stakeholders to take quick decisions. I don't know what that inflection point is (3-4 ?) but its what I have observed again and again in big organisations.
LatteLazy 4y ago
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
jt2190 4y ago
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.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  "Who watches the watchers ?"
thewellis2 4y ago
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.
- StopHammoTime 4y ago
  +1 on this. People forget product development is a collaborative process. If a PM is just chucking work over a fence, they’re not a PM. They can’t be doing their job effectively if they’re not spending as much time with developers as with customers.
xyzelement 4y ago
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 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.
- bastawhiz 4y ago
  I don't think you read the headline, either. The headline (and the article) both make no mention of engineering. In fact, you said nothing about innovation, which is the core premise of the article. From the post: > 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".
  - xyzelement 4y ago
    Fair enough! You're right.
deleted 4y ago
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nooorofe 4y ago
I think the article and most of the commentators are missing a real problem. The real problem is that there is an underlying complexity, which has no simple solution - collaboration of teams/groups of people with different expertise and even different interests is a universally unsolved problem. When a company passes the "startup" stage and gets real customers, it isn't a startup anymore. It has more tasks to handle and needs more people to work, people with different expertise. There are sales, operations, developers (with multiple expertise), lawyers, coordinators (of all kinds). Innovation is not a self-evident target, at some point startup needs to cash innovation. There are frameworks which attempted to address that complexity, for example scrum or more flexible superset "agile manifesto" or even waterfall. They all may work or fail, but there is no guarantee, no recipe.
NickC25 4y ago
I've seen PMs "scope creep" themselves to boost their CVs for when they leave and go somewhere else. These PMs suck. They are the type to lead meetings I was a PM for 4 years in a startup. I helped the engineers avoid (most) meetings, I was obsessed with our customers and their pain points - and spoke with them frequently; as well hyper-obsessed with the competition and where we could improve. I took suggestions from users about what features to build next, and we built a few, and ignored others. I wouldn't bother my engineers unless management (who had a technical background) OK'd the feature after discussion and debate. I probably spent 2-3x the amount of time with my customers than my engineers. Sometimes as the PM the only interaction with my engineers was to bring them coffee in the morning while they cranked out code. Seems there aren't many PMs like the role I played in my team. In a B2B or B2C startup, a good PM can provide structure, cover for the engineers, and a consistent look into how the product is being used, why it's used versus your competition, and what features users want going forward. A PM doing the right things is more of a design and customer support hybrid role than anything else. That said, I don't understand why it's a bad thing to "stop innovating". If you have an innovative product that is clearly a hit with customers or users, you shouldn't aim to continually innovate past that in the short-term. You should be eliminating technical debt and making sure your core product's experience just fucking works 100% of the time. A good PM can help with that too, by putting management's ideas onto the backburner and saying "we have to solidify our product first" instead of jumping from one product to another.
- ghiculescu 4y ago
  can I hire you?
  - NickC25 4y ago
    Yes! I saw a bit about your companies, and not sure where exactly I'd fit in, but always down to have a chat. My email and linkedin are in my profile.
    - ghiculescu 4y ago
      I just though that was a funny comment, but now I'm going to reach out for real.
dependsontheq 4y ago
Product Management is often a role where a lot of strategic business decisions and operational product decisions collide. A product needs to be innovative and relevant for a market but even with our tools today everything built for the future is a bet, so it is risky. Most PMs are not C-Level, so they are not allowed to take that kind of risk. So they manage a small box of possible pathways with low risk and low gain. So as soon as you shift all strategic decisions (a product owner in a software company is not far from a business owner) to the PM roles you limited the future development of your business to this small box. Is that the fault of a PM?
arka2147483647 4y ago
Well, he really struck a ligthning rod, people here seem to be arguing that, 1. He is wrong, PM are not at all like that 2. He is wrong, ofcourse that is what PM does 3. He is wrong, the criticism is written the wrong way Amusing…
karaterobot 4y ago
This is overstating the case by a lot. I guess I agree that innovation should not come from the management layer of a company, organization and motivation should. But, I have worked with great PMs who multiplied the effectiveness of their teams, and they were indispensible. A lot of people who should not be PMs end up in PM roles, but I wouldn't generalize that to the whole profession. > First most product managers believe that the most important thing to do, is to interview users, look at data of usage, and then take some obvious bet to take the best decisions Heaven forfend! We've got to put a stop to that sort of behavior. I agree with the author, people should be making big, incomprehensible bets without talking to users or looking at data first.
SheddingPattern 4y ago
Ironic that the author calls PMs "not very smart at making product decisions" while the author is not smart enough to understand the role of sales or product. Also, innovation is not an end in itself. The question is do, PMs add value? The author is right that the founder is the best product manager and should only handover to a dedicated PM once the business is ready to scale.
baxtr 4y ago
AFAIK Apple doesn’t have any PM roles for their major products. Think about that for a second. The most successful product company doesn’t have Product Managers. Saying this as a product person.
- achow 4y ago
  I can easily imagine that. My comment elsewhere aligns to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34867766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34867766
s3p 4y ago
> ...to facilitate decision making, make the project move forward. This is what is called “delivery” in the product management discipline. And this is usually the part that “Product managers” hate doing. The other part is “discovery”, it is meant to discover what to build, and this is the part that “Product managers” love doing. >If you are a startup B2B founder, I want to give you one piece of advice, don’t ever give a lot of power to product managers as long as you want to innovate. The article seems to make the point that PMs both love exploring and finding out what people want but also that they don't and that is the issue. It seems the author started by arguing project managers are all over the place, and (my line of thinking) that B2B companies therefore should be focused more on execution and delivering, not just finding a bunch of cool new tech/ideas to pursue. But then in the next few paragraphs they diverge by saying PMs actually stifle innovation because they want to look at data and improve things. They don't actually want to imagine something brand new. This makes no sense. I would agree that in a B2B environment, you want things that work, not a shiny new UI and new products every couple of months. Businesses are focused on revenue, not flashy new things like consumers might be. They want to know if it works. And if you're selling to other businesses, reliability is far more important than new features. Why does everyone use SAP and Oracle? It is certainly not because they innovate. I think the author just got very confused with their points and didn't know how to argue against PMs, but they clearly have a vendetta.

180 points by polote 4y ago

LOL somebody's PM told them to stay on task and stop making up features out of thin air

bkfh 4y ago

> The consequence of that is interviewing users in B2B is almost useless, and taking decisions from what users tell you is a severe error and in most cases the path to stagnation. Who would come up with such a nonsense? Regardless of B2C or B2B, knowing what your users need solved is crucial, irrelevant who eventually the buyer is (user vs Manager)

memen 4y ago
The issue with B2B is that the decision makers are not the users of the product. You need to convince the decision makers first, as otherwise you'll not sell. Hopefully, the decision makers value user requirements as well.
- magicalhippo 4y ago
  In my experience with B2B, the higher-ups don't really know what's actually needed by the company. Just one step up the ladder and important operational details are lost. This is why we strive to talk to the actual users as well, to understand what the company really needs. Some companies are worse than others, but I've got many examples of how the team manager, and everyone above, was unaware of essential procedures performed by users, sometimes even on a daily basis. Without which operations would grind to a halt. Similarly I also have many examples of companies where the higher-ups selected a competitor without considering their users, and it all ending in tears as the product couldn't do what was actually needed for daily operations. Most of them struggle for a while to make it work, before pulling the plug and coming to us.

shalmanese 4y ago

You need to be talking to Users, Customers and Stakeholders and be clear about which is which. And if you just build what a user tells you to build, then you’re not a very good PM. Users are not designers, you go to users to get an understanding of what the problems are but users communicate problems in terms of solutions so a good PM uses the proposed solution to understand the problem and then creates a solution that actually solves that problem.

huksley 4y ago

It is because product managers should only be hired at the company after post product-market fit. And they innovate usually not in creating the new product, but improving the existing one, or identifying the possible new product to be created.

user_named 4y ago
At an early stage startup the founders are the product managers, and if they are bad at it, they won't get funding or revenue.

nandorsky 4y ago

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 startup not understanding the complexities of how the buyer and users differ and asking questions such as, “Would you use this feature?” is a poor PM. Don’t let one bad experience ruin your perception of the role.

polote 4y ago
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"
- jayparth 4y ago
  Paul, it’s a bad article. Your arguments don’t make sense and are mostly strawmen. If you want to improve it, show it to someone in real life and have them talk over it with you. You’ll probably get a lot farther than a few sentences of feedback over the internet. But it’s really bad.
- passwordoops 4y ago
  100% what others are saying. This is a hot take rant with bad arguments based on an experience with a bad product manager (or maybe you're just difficult to work with and your ideas aren't as innovative or as good as you think). I can easily flip the script and say "Devs at B2B shouldn't be anything more than oompah-loompahs" or "UI designers shouldn't be allowed to give ideas" based on a couple of my own isolated experiences. You want to be taken seriously? Don't rant and explain what structure/methods would be more appropriate for a B2B business that would balance the need for innovation that makes users happy with keeping the paying gatekeepers willing to keep paying
- 4y ago

rokkk 4y ago

This post makes some wild assumptions, like the fact that B2B PMs only interview customers, and not end users. Also, that they mostly build what people are saying they want to have. Ironically, avoiding assumptions is the basis of product management. At the end of the day, someone has to do the product role on the team. If the founder can scale that, great, and if the engineers can do it, even better! Unfortunately both options are extremely rare to find. There are a lot of shitty PMs out there, just as there are a lot of shitty engineers or any other job function.. We would do better, I think, to discuss and promote better patterns, than trying to discredit a whole profession by clumsily reverse engineering a handful of gross assumptions and, probably, bad personal experiences.

diceduckmonk 4y ago
> There are a lot of shitty PMs out there, just as there are a lot of shitty engineers or any other job function Indeed, both can create negative value for a project. At least with engineers, we have slightly better proxies for interviewing. Leetcode sucks but it does filters out people who can’t code or grasp recursion. Unfortunately, the source of resentment towards Leetcode is that it also filters out people who can code in a practical setting (false negatives). While false positives are increasingly common with Leetcode now that tech is lucrative and people know how to play the game, people who pass Leetcode interviews can program in some capacity

dchuk 4y ago

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.

tchock23 4y ago
This, plus if you see them mentioning the Henry Ford ‘quote’ about horses you can reliably close the browser tab because they’re about to build a straw man argument against doing basic customer/user research.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Isn't it nice that those meme-like anecdotes, or whatever they are exist? Other examples are the Maginot Line in WW2, Amazon was never profitable, ERP systems suck because of their sales reps playing golf with their clients...
- meany 4y ago
  Interesting, I’ve always thought of this quote justifying deeper user research than just asking users what they want, not less. I’ve seen people who don’t really understand user needs over index on what they say they want versus deeply understanding their workflow and needs.
  - llamaLord 4y ago
    The quote is designed to make you understand that building products is about understanding problems, not listening to desired solutions. A PM's job is to be the owner of the "problem space", while the engineering teams job is to be the owners of the "solution space". Fords point was that his customers would only ever tell him about solutions they wanted (faster horse). When in actual fact what mattered to Ford was the problem (current modes of personal transport being expensive, unreliable, uncomfortable, slow, single-person). Any good PM should be able to explain this to you. OP has never worked with a proper PM apparently... Just BA's and Project Managers that wanted a pay bump.

switch007 4y ago

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

SQueeeeeL 4y ago
Because those skills require actual experience and domain-expertice. You can't factory print MBAs that actually give you skills, but you can create the illusion of value by teaching something, so they throw out a bunch of random econ and ways to control employees and everything gets a little bit worse everytime someone graduates
- testTED 4y ago
  Those with the domain expertise stay away because of this culture.
- rjbwork 4y ago
  Unfortunately, domain experience is no panacea. Dealing with product people that don't understand technology but do understand the domain is equally as frustrating.
- perrygeo 4y ago
  This. Some product folks know their industry well and have actual hands-on experience building something in the same ballpark. They are a joy to work with. Even if they don't do their job particularly well, you can ask them real questions and trust them to make reasonable decisions. They have an intuitive sense of what does and doesn't work for the target audience. Product folks who don't have domain experience always seem to fail, no matter how hard they work. Their opinion is not trustworthy on important topics. To compensate for their obvious lack of merit, they HUSTLE. They fall into the trap of crowd-sourcing ideas, insisting on design patterns that make no sense, and micromanaging a project to death with story points. They pathologically avoid any tough decisions (because deep down they know they don't have the skill or knowledge to make them) and prefer to focus on small tractable tickets that they show visible progress. No matter how well they run their processes, their lack of domain experience will almost ensure poor quality.

snupas 4y ago

The whole article seems really juvenile and poorly written.

dandare 4y ago

> And finally if you are really good at taking decisions to make a company successful you will have started a company of your own a long time ago Except this is true of anyone in the company. Unless the author says who is capable of making these really good decisions this article is empty rant.

Xylakant 4y ago
The idea that someone that is good at making decisions that make a company successful would always start their own company is wrong on many levels. Running a company is about much more than making a product successful. There’s all the nitty gritty stuff that constantly bogs you down from legal, tax, finance, interpersonal stuff in the company landing on your plate. Some of that can be handed off to an accountant or lawyer, but you still need to learn at least the basics of it to understand what they’re trying to tell you and decide based on that advice. You need access to capital, sometimes a lot. Your risk profile is entirely different than as an employee. Many companies just fail with a total loss. Many people can’t afford a total loss. There’s a strong bias in tech circles to view the outliers that made it from garage to unicorn, but they’re just that: outliers. Don’t make the mistake of considering them the norm.

zhrvoj 4y ago

Product manager - person that screwed up Evernote.

LASR 4y ago

While my experience has lined up with the content of this post, I also think the conclusions only apply to a narrow set of organizations and products. There are a lot of products, especially in enterprise or B2B where the customer is not someone asking for a faster horse. They themselves are innovators and they want something they’ll use and pay for. So there is certainly value in pouring through the data and finding the best value to build next. And for that a PM is pretty important to lead product.

sergioisidoro 4y ago

> If you are a startup B2B founder, I want to give you one piece of advice, don’t ever give a lot of power to product managers as long as you want to innovate. Take your most competent sales person and put him in charge of the product This is much worse. You'll end up doing what individual customers ask, lose product strategy and run the risk of having a guy in sales deciding the next features on the fly during sales meetings, promising stuff just to get that deal signed. Some good points here, but it feels more of a symptom of other problems, like the lack of a tech lead who manages the team (so the PM ends up doing it)

ghiculescu 4y ago
It sounds like you haven’t ever worked with a good salesperson. (I realize the irony of this comment.)

politelemon 4y ago

> Second, most product managers are not smart in the sense that they make good product decisions. Anyone can be a product manager, you just need to pretend to know how things work and have done other things in the past. Product managers really rarely evaluate themselves on the KPI they have achieved in the past. And finally if you are really good at taking decisions to make a company successful you will have started a company of your own a long time ago (Not everyone want to create their own company, yes I know, but the high performers do :) ) It's pretty clear that this is the author's view of a PM and not what PMs actually do. It is the premise, and an incorrect one at that, of the entire post. Imagine such hyperbole flipped around and applied to developers, this would be receiving a lot more vitriol.

hahahanononono 4y ago

This is the kind of post a shitty PM would write...

nickdothutton 4y ago

Where to start with this. All I will say is that the job of the Product Manager is if nothing else, to manage the product through the product lifecycle. Concept, development, release, revision, maturity, retirement/death, including likely migration to some new product/service that is a logical replacement. These core duties are most clearly exercised in small product-lead companies. In large firms the job can become very bureaucratic and political as everyone wants to put a hand on the ships wheel, especially if the company is a single-product company. Edited for typo.

rukuu001 4y ago

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.

spacecadet 4y ago
Agreed and that hacker news readers may not be any different than the average news consumer, going on title and no content when forming an opinion.
rib3ye 4y ago
And if those engineers read to the last line, I think they would pretty surprised at the author’s conclusion: > Take your most competent sales person and put him in charge of the product.
- ghiculescu 4y ago
  This is great advice. I think people are reacting badly, because they are skipping over the word "competent" and attributing a lot of malice to the word "sales". I think it says more about the disconnect between dev and sales, than the actual sins of sales people.

numlock86 4y ago

The funny part is how the article starts off with how others are missing the point, and then the article continues to completely miss the point. I didn't know you could put that much bias and wrong assumptions into such a few paragraphs.

dohman 4y ago

The writer's trying to argue that product managers aren't useless, but that they have too much power. Okay, sure, but they go about it in the most confusing way possible. They start off by saying that developers who think PMs are useless are missing the point, which is fair, but then they go on this whole tangent about how PMs are actually important because they can help with decision-making and project delivery..? And then they start shitting on PMs, saying that they're not actually that smart and they only like the discovery part of their job where they get to make all the decisions. And to top it off, they say that PMs in B2B companies are useless because they're not actually talking to the people who use the product... That's literally the job of a PM, to talk to customers and figure out what they want. And then they go on to say that if you want to innovate, you shouldn't listen to PMs, but instead put your most competent salesperson in charge of the product. That makes no sense at all. Sadly, as someone else said, I'd assume that this article was driven by poor experiences with a PM in the past. And it's not cool to take a bash at the whole segment due to having a bad experience with someone.

anentropic 4y ago

> What matters is to make your customers happy, and sometimes, and pretty often this is not needed, so all time spent on it is time you will not spend on the most important people, your customers. I don't understand, this seems to say: "all the time spent on making your customers happy is time not spent on your customers" ...huh?

michaelf77 4y ago
"it" is what USER wants, as opposite to customer. One of the key takeaways from the article should be that in B2B the customer is often is not the user.

beebmam 4y ago

Devs working directly with customers will always be better than relying on PMs to do it. But it's hard to find devs with the soft skills needed, and are willing to do so.

user_named 4y ago
Those people are generally referred to as product managers
- llamaLord 4y ago
  This guy gets it...
- klysm 4y ago
  I disagree, is writing code usually part of the product manager role?
- beebmam 4y ago
  In my experience, most PMs aren't software engineers.

revskill 4y ago

PM to me means communicators. They free developers from doing such social work. Developers in most case is the implementers, not communicators. The issue is, what's the scope of an efficient PM. Should they involve in product development process ? Should they involve in the UX design process ?

llamaLord 4y ago
My motto as a PM when talking to my engineering teams is "I go to meetings so that you don't have to" =) They seem to appreciate my sacrifice...

andyish 4y ago

I imagine there's a lot more going on behind the scenes that the author realises. If it's a single product startup a PM will be getting pulled in different directions by sales, marketing, tech, clients and investors. All who have their own agenda, all of whom may want different things. It only sounds like PMs have all the power because they put the tasks in the order that you work on them in, after haggling with all the other stakeholders. I'd guess that the PM in the story trying to get some evidence to backup a decision/convince someone of something.

trollied 4y ago

This article is terrible. Lots of speculation and biased opinion, with absolutely no facts or alternative team structure suggestions. It's more of a rant.

getoffmyyawn 4y ago

As an engineering leader, I tend to agree that giving Product Managers too much power causes lots of problems. A big one is retaining good engineers. My experience of bad PMs is that they live in the Y side of the XY problem space[0] and believe they should have total say over how the engineers and designers spend every minute of their time. Thankfully my company has a great CPO and we have agreed to avoid this type of PM. Anyone who says that the PM should be the Product CEO is not hired. Anyone who says they are the one to define how the engineering teams work is not hired. At a truly tech lead organization, PMs work for the engineering teams, not the other way around. We have some great PMs who collaborate and provide lots of value. 0. https://xyproblem.info/ https://xyproblem.info/

stakhanov 4y ago
> At a truly tech lead organization, PMs work for the engineering teams, not the other way around. This reminds me of a company I worked at that had a lot of rhetoric going around inverting the power relationship between teams and their managers. Basically the "project manager" role was renamed into "project advisor", the department manager to departmental advisor and so forth, carrying the connotation that a subordinate might just choose to ignore "advice" from above. In reality, the whole thing was a charade to bullshit people into believing they had more power than they actually had. If someone decided to disagree on any given piece of "advice", they would usually find themselves in a call with the line manager one level up and be told that they were perfectly on track for not getting any salary increase this cycle and no more promotions ever again, because of the arrogance, ignorance, and a dozen other negative personality traits, attributable to anyone who won't follow "advice". This was soo much worse than just having "a boss". If you have a boss, you might just think to yourself "The boss is full of shit, but I'll have to implement it anyway, because that's just how it goes. He has power, I don't." But now there is this whole gaslighting element where you start to question your own reality: "Why does it seem to me right now that the boss is full of shit? Is that because I'm too arrogant to take advice? Is it because I'm too dumb to fully grasp the greater wisdom of his advice?" Once you create a caste such as the "product managerial" caste, it just doesn't matter what you call them, and how you define their role on paper. They are going to be in power. Because there has to be some reason why you chose to distinguish them from the engineers. The article itself seems to reflect some of the bogus beliefs that motivate why engineers can't be their own product managers: Like they are so socially inept that they can't coordinate with relevant stakeholders, and they are so far removed from the customer that they have no way of figuring out by themselves what to build. There also has to be a reason why you chose to distinguish them from the sales people: Like salespeople will just recklessly say "yes" to any and all customer demands with no idea of the cost of actually building stuff. So what's the solution, if you think you have these problems? Apparently, to create a new caste of people. Let's call them "product managers". And because we are calling them something different, those prejudices won't have to apply to them. They won't be socially inept and removed from the customer, because we're not calling them engineers. And they won't be reckless because we're not calling them salespeople. If you hold those beliefs, they are going to be in charge, won't they? Because you've just chosen to think of everyone else in this negative way, and put those project managers up on a pedestal. You've chosen a whole caste of people whose very reason for being is predicated on those negative beliefs about these other groups. And they'll work hard to perpetuate those beliefs, possibly even sabotage the company to make them stay true. They don't even have to be evil to act this way, just human, because is psychologically natural. Hire a full time event manager, and you'll have someone who will constantly be politicking the company into doing events, because, otherwise, why are they here? Hire full time product managers, and you'll have someone who will constantly be politicking the company into not letting engineers and sales people make "product" decisions. The better thing to do is to go back to the original problems and try to solve them: Like, give engineers blocks of time off from coding duty, so they have time to be more proactively communicating with stakeholders. Send them along with a sales person every now and then so they get to talk to customers regularly. Give them time off so they can be trained in usability and design. Let sales people follow along with engineering status updates when you're building a feature that they promised to a customer. So they come to appreciate just how much work it is to actually build stuff. ...now there's no longer a need to have product managers, and you've actually solved problems that were going to cause trouble anyway, regardless of whether you have product managers or not.

fxtentacle 4y ago

The only good PM that I ever met introduced himself like this: My job is to answer product questions when the developers ask me and then confirm those answers with our customers. All those PMs that fancy themselves mind readers in that they believe they can define what the customer needs and what the developers should build, without hearing their perspective first, are just bad managers with a different name.

gregw2 4y ago

Is this phenomena better or worse if you make your tech lead a product manager?

dschuetz 4y ago

What is B2B?

drbscl 4y ago
Business to business; making a product that targets businesses rather than consumers
- 1over137 4y ago
  I do wish article writers would define their acronyms, at least once.

mabbo 4y ago

I don't know what awful experiences this author has had with product managers, but all this article has done is made me appreciate the brilliant PMs I get to work with every day.

drbscl 4y ago

I think this is what separates good from bad PMs. I work with a good PM who gives engineers a bit of room for innovation, and importantly identifies how to productise that innovation.

spacecadet 4y ago

I immediately thought. Tech culture has become... "Im upset. Im going to rage write a blog post. Im going to publish it on another site. Now I somewhat have to manage the blow back." Why? What an overly complex way to vent, but as a "PM", exactly what Ive come to expect. My recommendation would have been to vent to a friend in private, research says "over beer" works best...

evnix 4y ago

Most good software out there were started by engineers and not by product managers and engineer only products are generally great and liked by people. Linux and the ecosystem is one example. I am not sure what really happens after Product Managers come in that the product takes a dive. I have seen this repeat almost everywhere. You start with a small team of engineers and have a product that people love, now you need more engineers and hence you bring in a manager and managers almost always demand to have a product manager and the whole thing devolves into a game of promotion. Doctors are lead by Senior Doctors, Lawyers are lead by Senior lawyers, whereas Engineers need handholding that also sucks the very joy out of engineering. In my opinion, What could be more beneficial is to have Product Managers who also are senior engineers and who atleast do hands-on development 10% of their time. This is exactly how even the senior most doctors still perform surgeries. unless it is customized B2B or B2G, where the engineers are not really interested in the mundane chores of the nitty gritty of a drop-down or having to have constant arguments on what the button should be called, you likely dont need a ProductMgr. The other thing that happens as soon as productMgrs enter is engineers let go of the ownership of the product. The back button doesn't work? well good luck, that was not in the PMs requirements. now raise more unnecessary tickets and show the improved velocity.

Closi 4y ago
> Lawyers are lead by Senior lawyers You could argue that Lawyers are lead by their clients in the same way that Engineers are led by their end users / PMs. The difference is that in the Doctor & Lawyer examples your end-user is very obvious because it is the person in-front of you. With Engineering you are not usually in constant contact with your end users, hence the PM role.
- breckenedge 4y ago
  It’s not quite so obvious in medicine. The patient often isn’t the one paying the bill, so the insurance company or government is the actual customer. In that regards, it’s more like a B2B transaction.
- htrp 4y ago
  You mean lawyers are led by Partners at the firm.....

fit2rule 4y ago

[dead]

achow 4y ago

Though mentions enterprise space (B2B), should mention that in hardware and software consumer product companies the product manager roles does not show much value. Investing in Design+Engg gives maximum return. These two disciplines have other ones around them like project management, overall product owner (PO, General Manager), etc. It is really weird when one sees PMs being mentioned as the one who talks to customers or users. Usually designers were doing that right from beginning, going back to half a century or more..

breckenedge 4y ago
I agree that design+engineering is the optimal team structure. For some reason, I’ve found lately that designers don’t want to work with engineers. This happens regardless of whether or not the engineer and designer work in the same office. Because of this, designers come up with prototypes that are more expensive to implement than what is required to meet the customer’s needs. So at some point, engineers have to have awkward conversations with designers about trimming scope. This seems to me why we have PMs: engineers naturally avoid the awkward conversations, build half-fancy things because they have a budget to meet and “it wasn’t in the design,” and no one is happy with the final product. I feel like there is still a better way out there, and I think it involves engineering and design both breaking out of their shells, and that’s where a PM can really help.

christkv 4y ago

I have a theory about when innovation slows down to a crawl. Its the inflection point of where there are too many stakeholders to take quick decisions. I don't know what that inflection point is (3-4 ?) but its what I have observed again and again in big organisations.

LatteLazy 4y ago

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

jt2190 4y ago

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.

BlueTemplar 4y ago
"Who watches the watchers ?"

thewellis2 4y ago

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.

StopHammoTime 4y ago
+1 on this. People forget product development is a collaborative process. If a PM is just chucking work over a fence, they’re not a PM. They can’t be doing their job effectively if they’re not spending as much time with developers as with customers.

xyzelement 4y ago

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 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.

bastawhiz 4y ago
I don't think you read the headline, either. The headline (and the article) both make no mention of engineering. In fact, you said nothing about innovation, which is the core premise of the article. From the post: > 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".
- xyzelement 4y ago
  Fair enough! You're right.

deleted 4y ago

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nooorofe 4y ago

I think the article and most of the commentators are missing a real problem. The real problem is that there is an underlying complexity, which has no simple solution - collaboration of teams/groups of people with different expertise and even different interests is a universally unsolved problem. When a company passes the "startup" stage and gets real customers, it isn't a startup anymore. It has more tasks to handle and needs more people to work, people with different expertise. There are sales, operations, developers (with multiple expertise), lawyers, coordinators (of all kinds). Innovation is not a self-evident target, at some point startup needs to cash innovation. There are frameworks which attempted to address that complexity, for example scrum or more flexible superset "agile manifesto" or even waterfall. They all may work or fail, but there is no guarantee, no recipe.

NickC25 4y ago

I've seen PMs "scope creep" themselves to boost their CVs for when they leave and go somewhere else. These PMs suck. They are the type to lead meetings I was a PM for 4 years in a startup. I helped the engineers avoid (most) meetings, I was obsessed with our customers and their pain points - and spoke with them frequently; as well hyper-obsessed with the competition and where we could improve. I took suggestions from users about what features to build next, and we built a few, and ignored others. I wouldn't bother my engineers unless management (who had a technical background) OK'd the feature after discussion and debate. I probably spent 2-3x the amount of time with my customers than my engineers. Sometimes as the PM the only interaction with my engineers was to bring them coffee in the morning while they cranked out code. Seems there aren't many PMs like the role I played in my team. In a B2B or B2C startup, a good PM can provide structure, cover for the engineers, and a consistent look into how the product is being used, why it's used versus your competition, and what features users want going forward. A PM doing the right things is more of a design and customer support hybrid role than anything else. That said, I don't understand why it's a bad thing to "stop innovating". If you have an innovative product that is clearly a hit with customers or users, you shouldn't aim to continually innovate past that in the short-term. You should be eliminating technical debt and making sure your core product's experience just fucking works 100% of the time. A good PM can help with that too, by putting management's ideas onto the backburner and saying "we have to solidify our product first" instead of jumping from one product to another.

ghiculescu 4y ago
can I hire you?
- NickC25 4y ago
  Yes! I saw a bit about your companies, and not sure where exactly I'd fit in, but always down to have a chat. My email and linkedin are in my profile.
  - ghiculescu 4y ago
    I just though that was a funny comment, but now I'm going to reach out for real.

dependsontheq 4y ago

Product Management is often a role where a lot of strategic business decisions and operational product decisions collide. A product needs to be innovative and relevant for a market but even with our tools today everything built for the future is a bet, so it is risky. Most PMs are not C-Level, so they are not allowed to take that kind of risk. So they manage a small box of possible pathways with low risk and low gain. So as soon as you shift all strategic decisions (a product owner in a software company is not far from a business owner) to the PM roles you limited the future development of your business to this small box. Is that the fault of a PM?

arka2147483647 4y ago

Well, he really struck a ligthning rod, people here seem to be arguing that, 1. He is wrong, PM are not at all like that 2. He is wrong, ofcourse that is what PM does 3. He is wrong, the criticism is written the wrong way Amusing…

karaterobot 4y ago

This is overstating the case by a lot. I guess I agree that innovation should not come from the management layer of a company, organization and motivation should. But, I have worked with great PMs who multiplied the effectiveness of their teams, and they were indispensible. A lot of people who should not be PMs end up in PM roles, but I wouldn't generalize that to the whole profession. > First most product managers believe that the most important thing to do, is to interview users, look at data of usage, and then take some obvious bet to take the best decisions Heaven forfend! We've got to put a stop to that sort of behavior. I agree with the author, people should be making big, incomprehensible bets without talking to users or looking at data first.

SheddingPattern 4y ago

Ironic that the author calls PMs "not very smart at making product decisions" while the author is not smart enough to understand the role of sales or product. Also, innovation is not an end in itself. The question is do, PMs add value? The author is right that the founder is the best product manager and should only handover to a dedicated PM once the business is ready to scale.

baxtr 4y ago

AFAIK Apple doesn’t have any PM roles for their major products. Think about that for a second. The most successful product company doesn’t have Product Managers. Saying this as a product person.

achow 4y ago
I can easily imagine that. My comment elsewhere aligns to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34867766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34867766

s3p 4y ago

> ...to facilitate decision making, make the project move forward. This is what is called “delivery” in the product management discipline. And this is usually the part that “Product managers” hate doing. The other part is “discovery”, it is meant to discover what to build, and this is the part that “Product managers” love doing. >If you are a startup B2B founder, I want to give you one piece of advice, don’t ever give a lot of power to product managers as long as you want to innovate. The article seems to make the point that PMs both love exploring and finding out what people want but also that they don't and that is the issue. It seems the author started by arguing project managers are all over the place, and (my line of thinking) that B2B companies therefore should be focused more on execution and delivering, not just finding a bunch of cool new tech/ideas to pursue. But then in the next few paragraphs they diverge by saying PMs actually stifle innovation because they want to look at data and improve things. They don't actually want to imagine something brand new. This makes no sense. I would agree that in a B2B environment, you want things that work, not a shiny new UI and new products every couple of months. Businesses are focused on revenue, not flashy new things like consumers might be. They want to know if it works. And if you're selling to other businesses, reliability is far more important than new features. Why does everyone use SAP and Oracle? It is certainly not because they innovate. I think the author just got very confused with their points and didn't know how to argue against PMs, but they clearly have a vendetta.