[ec109685]

Why should that responsibility solely come from the product manager? Are devs incapable of their own good ideas if given a chance to understand the customer as well?

The product manager should be the overall decider, but the best products do not germinate out of a single person’s head.

[yodon]

The person you're responding to is not advocating that ideas are the responsibility of the PM, nor are they saying the PM should be the overall decider.

They are saying the PM is responsible for collecting information from the customer and bringing that information to the team in an efficient manner so the team can make decisions based on that information.

If the PM brings incorrect or inadequate information, the resulting product will be poor because the team will have made its decisions on the basis of that poor information.

[nickforr]

How does the PM know better than devs about whether or not they’re bringing the right information and not inadvertently summarising something incorrectly that’s technically important? Gatekeepers are generally inefficient longer-term.

[arcbyte]

You're attributing gatekeeping to the wrong place here. The customer is the gate and the customer's unavailability is keeping the gate shut.

The PO reduces that inadvertent gatekeeping by being always available with customer insights so the devs don't twiddle their thumbs or worse, build thr wrong thing, because they were guessing what the customer wanted in the absence of actually talking to them.

The PO reduces gatekeeping because they are an always available customer.

[goldcd]

Yes - also there are many customers. PdO is a weighted amalgamation of them all.

[geertj]

> Why should that responsibility solely come from the product manager?

It should not, but the PM is accountable. GP put it nicely, effective PMs know better what customers want than customers themselves. This keeps iterations fast as PMs can immediately answer questions on trade offs instead of going back to the customers (who don’t know).

[mavelikara]

> effective PMs know better what customers want than customers themselves.

Please don't attribute superhuman skills to any particular team member.

For modern products valuable enough to be worth building deliberately, nobody knows what the market wants.

The team has hypothesises which they validate with software releases. The PM is accountable for these experiments.

Also, the use of the word "effective" in the quoted sentence is a setup for a No True Scotsman.

[geertj]

I am speaking from experience, and no, I am not superhuman. As a PM it is quite common to understand customers (meaning, customer use cases) better than they understand them themselves. The domain is complex, and customers try to find solutions just like the PM. But, as a PM you have the benefit of talking to many customers so you see common patterns and can often see the ‘problem behind the problem’.

I did not say that a PM will understand any customer issue, and yes sometimes new research is needed, which is expensive and time consuming.

I do not see the link to the true Scotsman argument as in my view my description of a PM is not mythical or heroic but quite common at least in my area.

[mavelikara]

> The domain is complex, and customers try to find solutions just like the PM. But, as a PM you have the benefit of talking to many customers so you see common patterns and can often see the ‘problem behind the problem’.

I agree to most of this. The team - by virtue of building and operating the software product catering for many customers - can often understand the customer usecases and solution better than any one customer. But it is the team, as a whole, where this expertise resides. Not one member of the team who happens to have a particular role and title.

> I do not see the link to the true Scotsman argument

By adding the word "effective" in:

> effective PMs know better what customers want than customers themselves.

you seemed to imply that any counterexample of a PM who is not doing this as not a true effective PM, and hence, not worth discussing.

[geertj]

> But it is the team, as a whole, where this expertise resides. Not one member of the team who happens to have a particular role and title.

Which is why I made the distinction between accountable and responsible. I totally agree that it’s the team as a whole that’s responsible for the output of the team, and that it’s essential that everybody on the team has a customer focus.

> you seemed to imply that any counterexample of a PM who is not doing this as not a true effective PM, and hence, not worth discussing.

In my opinion, the better a PM understands their customers, the more effective they are in their role. I had thought that this would be relatively noncontroversial. It certainly wasn’t a dig against a some subset of my profession. Virtually all PMs that I’ve worked with see this as core to their role.

Now I am curious, was there anything in the wording of my reply, or in your past experience working with PMs, that caused you to reply?

[mavelikara]

> Now I am curious, was there anything in the wording of my reply, or in your past experience working with PMs, that caused you to reply?

No, it is not anything you said specifically, Geert. But I have direct and indirect knowledge of PMs who adopt the "All the shipped features were my ideas, the bugs and tech debt were added by engineers" attitude. This thread too gave my that vibe.

I have written more of my opinions on the PM orgs at [1] and [2]. Happy to chat more, if you are interested - my email is on my profile.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28965764

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27391220

[arcbyte]

The problem isn't arbitrarily keeping the customer away from the devs and replacing them with a PO. The problem is the customer is fucking busy doing business and supporting two other software initiatives. They don't have time. The devs can never get their hands on the customers time in enough quantity to be truly effective.

The PO is an always available customer.

And here's the wonderful thing about agile - if you happen to have an always available customer, you don't need a product owner