[jayp]

This comment is aligned very much with my current thinking. Hiring highly paid engineers but not maximizing their problem solving ability is a significant problem in large companies.

Empowering bottoms-up problem solving by sharing customer pains and feedback broadly is the exactly problem I am trying to solve with my current project/startup [1].

I am gonna shoot you an email later today to see if you have any further thoughts on how do this effectively within an org.

If anyone has ideas on good implementing this, would love to learn so we can incorporate this within our offering. My email is in my profile.

[1] https://www.heraldhq.com

[vinay_ys]

A relatively small number of individuals are required to act as conduits of information – they should be good at collecting, analyzing, organizing and sharing information. They should be good facilitators to anchor a problem/solution across multiple teams/systems/skill-disciplines. These individuals are the PMs. As long as we don't let it go to their heads that they own the product and they are the deciders or some such notion that basically reduces everyone else's problem solving ability, PMs can be very useful.

[gowld]

"Product Manager" means everything from project manager (organizer / scrum master) to client relations manager to product designer (like a game designer who isn't the programmer). This confusion is problematic.

[pdimitar]

IMO there are a lot of good ideas how to solve such problems out there and that's not the blocker at all.

The real problem are the managers who only do lip service to better policies but never actually implement them. They prefer to distrust people by default and to play internal politics games so they never get fired. Thinking how the customer can succeed better and thus bring more revenue is practically one of the last points in their priority list. Not even sure that "let the creative people figure out solutions, you just give them the problems" even exists in their philosophy.

To me those are the real issues. And they are extremely hard to solve because those people are usually deeply entrenched in the organisation, they have the ear of the CEO and are being listened to during board meetings. And when those people sabotage the implementation of a policy that can improve the company's culture, well, there's basically almost nothing that can be done.

I might be too pessimistic but I've seen this scenario several times and have grown quite cynical about the ability of companies to change their DNA at all.