[rfairfax]

Do startups actually need product managers? A few months back, a job posting for a designer at inDinero included a sidebar that asked this question. Jessica suggested that the answer was "No".

It seems that product managers are not required when a company is relatively small, and a co-founder has the bulk of his/her time to dedicate to product development. In such a case, a team need be made up of only engineers and designers.

Even when teams are larger, new-ish web application frameworks like Rails make deployment incredibly easy/fast and all of the "strategic thinking" that a PM might ordinarily contribute is done with live product. In these situations, all of the activities listed in Joseph's blog post - focus, vision, avoiding frankensteinism, customer-centricity - could be handled by a product designer or product-minded engineer.

Are product managers a thing of the past? Seems increasingly likely.

[gyardley]

inDinero has what, five employees?

As teams grow and the scope of what they do grows, the need for specialization also grows.

Let's assume a wonderful team of world-class engineers who all happen to have the same skills as a world-class product manager, and who all like product management work. (If you like, they can all also be world-class designers.)

In my experience, pure product management work grows pretty linearly with the number of developers. (Providing they're organized, more developers means more projects or increased velocity on existing projects. Either means more product work.)

In this situation, each developer could spend X% of his time on product management work. (Let's say X% = 10%, since in my experience one product manager can keep ten developers busy.)

Great, you might think. Since every one of these developers can do and likes to do product management work, they'll each devote 10% of their time to it, and everything will work out fine.

There's only one problem with that - great products aren't built in small isolated portions. In order to be an effective product manager, you've got to know the whole product - so everyone doing any sort of product work has to coordinate with each other. As the team grows, so does the coordination overhead.

Even assuming a perfect central repository of knowledge (an uber-wiki?), so each developer only has to do a knowledge dump once, just consuming and synthesizing all the information created by all other people takes an increasing amount of time. And then there's the need to reach consensus when people's syntheses disagree, as they invariably do.

In these situations, as the team grows and/or the product gets more complex, someone inevitably ends up spending an increasing amount of their time on product, while others stop spending any. Someone becomes the guy who makes product decisions, while others defer to that guy.

Perhaps, when the dev team is ten people or so, that product-focused person's still spending a bit of time coding, and still calls himself a developer. But as the team grows, it's inevitable - you will either hire external dedicated product managers or you will grow them yourself from the inside.

[SoftwareMaven]

Startups absolutely need product managers if the founders don't have that skill. PMs have spent years learning how to understand the market and find where a product fits. Most founders don't have that experience so a lot gets built by hunch and (expensive) on-the-job PM training. I've worked at quite a few startups, but I have yet to find founders who understand the things PMs print to the table. Instead, they muddle through it.

You have to be careful, though. A startup PM is different than a Fortune 500 PM. One understands how to build new markets, the other how to tap into existing markets.

[shalmanese]

If the CEO can do double duty as the PM, then the startup does not need a PM. But I've seen startups where the CEO is constitutionally not a product person and the team was in dire need of a good PM to whip things into shape.

[sksultan]

Product managers, not necessarily. Product owners, absolutely.

A small, product minded team can definitely handle many of the activities associated with product management. So can the CEOs of early stage startups. Dropbox, facebook, and twitter all had founders focused on the vision, avoiding frankensteinism, customer development etc.

But this all changes as a company matures and as the product becomes increasingly more complex and multi-faceted. Larger development teams (~15-20+) often start working on specific product features. The company may have numerous external partners, customers, and users that influence the direction of the product. The CEO's time may shift from promoting/enforcing product vision to more 'CEO' type activities (e.g fundraising, PR work, analyst briefing). A product manager can be empowered to align the company's resources with the product vision.

[jpuopolo]

Well I have come across really good UX folks that encompass both traits. I think it is less a question about job, but the role they play and skillset. A product needs a sherpa, no matter who plays the part.