[n8cpdx]

It seems like there’s been a rush to the science mindset and the art part has been ignored by many in industry for the last 5-10 years.

I remember wanting to be a PM, but experience with the MBA-ification of the field has embittered me.

Seeing products (like Xamarin.Forms) systematically destroyed by focus on shallow metrics has been really sad. I remember being excited for that product to get a PM. Then the product just kept getting worse and kept stagnating. Developer interest has dropped precipitously and they haven’t managed to stay competitive with React Native or Flutter, despite having Microsoft’s resources.

All the time I give feedback on Visual Studio. I am a loyal customer, but I can only get “We’re closing this issue because we only prioritize problems with a broad customer impact, and you haven’t gotten enough upvotes” so many times. I’m sick of it.

I don’t think I’ve met a PM in the last 5 years that hasn’t made my impression of the company they work for far worse. And it comes down to focusing on business metrics and ignoring the two other sides: customer experience and interaction, and interactions with internal developer partners.

I don’t know why companies are only hiring and cultivating MBA-style, metrics-oriented, value-blind PMs, but the abandonment of art has made the industry worse for everyone involved.

[jaybrendansmith]

This is entirely because of a weak product culture at those companies. What does that mean? It means product is unable to make recommendations based on experience or design, only metrics. This is because engineering management only listens to metrics and data. (And yes, it could also be because the product team lacks talent) If there's a strong product culture, for example what Jobs had at Apple for a long time, the product team has executive backing and is able to make what others would call risky decisions. However if you are the product manager, speaking to the customers, these decisions are actually pretty obvious, and not particularly risky at all. Fortunately, in this situation you are empowered to make the right decisions for the end users. (To take a dead-obvious example: No macbook pro product lead would have ever suggested to remove all the ports. This decision was made by design. Had there been anyone in product with serious backing, this would never had been allowed to happen.) If you are in product management, the most important career decision you can make is to find companies with a strong product culture. Don't pick firms that do not value product, you will only be sidelined and blamed for their poor product decisions. The biggest challenge with your chosen career is that nobody outside of it understands it. It takes a certain confidence and a great deal of skill to be consistently successful.

[candiddevmike]

If it makes you feel better, these PMs are ruining development too: the developers can absolutely see that issue you referenced and were probably telling the PM they can knock it out in a few minutes or even started working on it already. PM will step in and say no, you do what's on the backlog. Developers lose all agency and start quitting. Product further deteriorates.

As a dev, the best kind of work is when you're connecting with your users and solving a real pain for them. Being robbed of these opportunities is how you get burnt out.

[beckingz]

And this is why Product Engineers are a thing now.

[thenerdhead]

Yep. It's a very logical, data-driven mindset that is only concerned about "pushing the needle closer" rather than providing actual value.

Many of the mechanisms of how those teams operate are flawed. You may have filed the same issue that was closed previously because of low upvotes, but now there are multiple reports of it! It's almost an anti-pattern of being data-driven.

Most companies know that business metrics follow great products when teams have full autonomy, competence, and relatedness. (i.e. VS Code, JetBrains Suite, etc). Sadly in the process they end up killing those very things that made them successful when reaching certain scale.

The PM discipline is getting more definition in the industry, but to your point, hardly anybody practices the art. The art to me is being "data inspired", not driven or informed. It's hard for PMs in big tech to do that nowadays unless it part of the culture from the top-down or taught/mentored from the bottom-up.

[dexterous]

The COO at my last job kept touting the aphorism "Data Trumps Opinion" to the point where he had T-shirts made with that (facepalm!)

I'm just glad those just sat on his table and never made it onto anyone's back.

[thenerdhead]

Uck. I get that people can feel that way as opinions are often way worse, but tshirts? Haha

[ryandrake]

I was briefly a PM in a past company and I agree 100%. The obsession with chasing business metrics over actual performance, quality, and end-user value is demoralizing. And it’s not just chasing metrics: it’s chasing vanity metrics like 7-day retention and number of weekly new installs (ignoring uninstalls).

I could never give the engineering team time to fix bugs, improve efficiency, or clean up tech debt, because of the constant pressure to feature-cram and juice “engagement” metrics.

I’ve since moved on to being a Program Manager so I can focus on the “when” and “how” and be a neutral third party when it comes to the “what”. Only way to keep sane.