[jonkoops]

This pretty much feels to me what is happening to Mozilla as an organization from an outsider perspective. Engineering is no longer as important as the evangelism and management is making strange decisions that lack focus on what the target audience really is.

[dblohm7]

My 2 cents: One of the reasons why I left is that there was no longer any symbiotic relationship between product management and engineering. Product makes unilateral decisions, throws them over the wall, and engineering is expected to quit whining and just do what they're told.

[tristor]

> My 2 cents: One of the reasons why I left is that there was no longer any symbiotic relationship between product management and engineering. Product makes unilateral decisions, throws them over the wall, and engineering is expected to quit whining and just do what they're told.

Ex-Mozilla PM here, I completely understand what you mean by this and I generally agree. I'll go a step further and say that as a PM I often didn't have a choice, either, decisions were being made above me and I often found out from the engineers that they'd been told to do something different than what I'd just expended significant effort on documentation to support doing. A primary reason why I left is that I felt like my wings were clipped as PM, and that I was unable to effectively build symbiosis with engineering. I'm more technical than most PMs at Mozilla were and had a better relationship (I think) with engineering than most of the PMs did, but it was a fundamentally untenable situation to be in, where I ended up just being a middle-man, which is not what a PM is supposed to be, and it doesn't create good products or user experiences.

Somewhat ironically, I think that Mozilla needs a stronger Product organization to succeed, but that wasn't happening. If PMs are doing their job right, they are there to advocate for the users/customers and ensure that the direction of the product aligns with how people are using it. At Mozilla, it felt to me like there was a very heavy top-down approach and with some exceptions, most product features or projects were focused on enabling alternative revenue pathways without regard to how this alienates existing users. Very little of what I was asked to work on had any chance of moving the needle on market share, which was and is the fundamental issue for Mozilla existentially.

[dblohm7]

> A primary reason why I left is that I felt like my wings were clipped as PM, and that I was unable to effectively build symbiosis with engineering.

I feel this hard. On the occasions that I tried to reach out to product management about things that, for important technical reasons, weren't going to work, I was more or less blocked by director-level management and told that I was being mean to my colleagues for wanting to provide that kind of feedback.

[allendoerfer]

Can anyone defend product management to me? Shouldn't this basically be UX/UI designers working together with developers based on user input acquired in some scientific way (either quantitative or qualitative)? How do product managers provide additional value?

[dblohm7]

IMHO: Product managers are super important: it's their job to understand the market (where it was, where it is, and where it is going), the competitive landscape, and work with leadership on strategic planning.

However, all three groups (UX, PM, Eng) need to work symbiotically. Everybody needs to be sharing information and acting as partners in the work they're doing.

[zamalek]

Mozilla PMs seem hell bent on dictating where the market goes, and it's not working.

[TedDoesntTalk]

> it's their job to understand the market

It’s their job to understand and copy chrome. Fixed that for you.

[sph]

If they're copying Chrome, I'm not seeing it.

Chrome has more or less had the same interface while Firefox rewrites it completely every few years, dropping features along the way each time.

[5e92cb50239222b]

Most of that evangelism doesn't even make any sense to me as a non-USian. I understand the US has its own share of internal problems, but feeding that to the whole world when I just want to download the damn browser seems weird. I won't post any links here to avoid offending anyone, but they should be pretty obvious.

[soundnote]

Not only does it not make sense, they presume they know better than their poor users what their users should see and what opinion on web content they should have. If I want activist browser developers, give me teams like Brave and Vivaldi, thankyouverymuch. Both actually do things that serve the end user in their own way. Insofar as the browsers have politics, they are politics about the browser itself like antitracking, privacy and user control.

Also not American and yeah, if California would stay in California, that would be great.

[wolverine876]

> if California would stay in California, that would be great

Then you wouldn't have most of the IT industry and especially FOSS.

[yeetsfromhellL2]

>especially FOSS.

I just wanted to log in and point out that Free Software got started at MIT.

[wolverine876]

That did cross my mind as I wrote the GP, but the center of it has been and is CA.

[sph]

Europe: am I a joke to you?

FOSS might've been born in the US but it's not a US only phenomenon these days, let alone Californian.

[theandrewbailey]

As a resident of a flyover state, I re-read that with California instead of US, and it still made sense.

[pessimizer]

The evangelism is even bad. It was more coherent and convincing back when the browser was better.

[Filligree]

The evangelism is mostly about stuff that nobody outside the USA cares about.

It just looks like the browser is made by crazy people.

[smachiz]

It would seem not many people inside the USA care about it either given their market share...

[pessimizer]

The evangelism was about web standards, web privacy, and user control. They deferred on standards to Google, and became positively hostile to the latter two subjects.

I neither care about woke messaging, nor notice them doing very much of it because I'm not the kind of guy who thinks an interracial couple in a tv commercial is commie globalist mind control. My problem is that:

1) their messages on standards are incoherent and not backed by taking firm stands. The only reason I'm confident that they won't break uBlock (i.e. will hold the line on a portion of manifest v3) any time soon is because they would drop from 4% market share to 0.5% market share in a month. This is not a good reason to be confident, because they lost a similar proportion of market share to get to where they're at now, and they didn't seem bothered.

2) Other than uBlock, they've taken away or left to languish things like javascript enable/disable whitelist/blacklists etc. and fine cookie control, and murdered their extension ecosystem that was filled with privacy protecting extensions, and 4/5ths of the ones that are there now look scary and I wouldn't install them. Too bad they lost the community that would have vetted those extensions in moments in favor of the technical solutions of nerfed webextension APIs formulated by a company whose entire business model is exfiltrating data from unsuspecting users. So much for user privacy.

3) Firefox started putting things into the browser that couldn't be turned off, removing configuration options, and pushing a "wrecker" or "overly-vocal minority" narrative at their users who objected to that. So much for user control.

Also, and I have no inside knowledge, it always seems like the people that write the website copy for whatever their latest PR effort is weren't even at the company for their last PR effort, and don't know anyone who was. I'm getting the impression that firefox is a place you go to burnish your resume/portfolio before getting a real job, which is the reason for the constant stupid tiny UI changes. Do people stay there for more than a year or two?

[TedDoesntTalk]

> I neither care about woke messaging, nor notice them doing very much of it

A lot of it is at Mozilla.org, the non profit parent of Mozilla.com

[2Gkashmiri]

why should mozilla continue to pay for a CEO and "managerial staff"? i don't mean accountants and all, but bosses and "managers" who are not paid by the work done but instead based on "market rates" as i read in some mozilla report sometime ago?

what benefit does having a CEO to mozilla do when insiders and outsiders like me see no tangible benefit? its not like apple which has to pay their CEO top dollar to show they are so good. can the mozilla org not hire X number of developers who would be doing the actual work instead of a single CEO whose job, according to me at least seems to be doing everything in their power to ruin the good name of mozilla? its as if they are paid to take all the bad decisions. strange