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by purpleblue
1399 days ago
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I worked with a "brilliant" product manager whose idea was to onboard several of our enterprise customers right after our first major deliverable, ie. midway through feature development. I vehemently pushed back, saying that it would be disruptive to our customers since the feature wasn't fully finished and it would slow us down, because we would need to change the order in which we would do development since customers expect a certain level of quality. I also said that any timelines after customers were onboarded were at risk, because if things were buggy, which they probably were since the feature wasn't finished yet, it would mean we would have to jump on them since they were our biggest customers. These all fell on deaf ears because they thought it would be important to get early feedback from our customers. I told them we could demo it, but we shouldn't onboard them. Again, they refused to listen. Things ended up being exactly as you expected, and I quit the job so that I didn't have to deal with this PM any more. |
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FWIW, I recognize it's fun to target PMs for ignoring technical constraints & carrying water for marketing... but for many PMs (in USA at least), they roll up to Marketing dept, rather than Eng.
So while it can seem PMs are (willfully?) technically Invincibly ignorant by default, their bosses are worse.
The best way to 'manage' your PM is help them build the biz case for your position. Eg "reduce risk of $XX loss" from bugs, opty costs, network effects of customer losing faith in your product. Plus I've found the "walk before you can run" argument works: they want to expand customer excitement by showing bright/shiny/new things. Promise them an even faster cadence of new things, after they give you time to get the fundamentals deployed.