[martin_drapeau]

PMs are essenial for B2C. You need to abstract a huge mass of end-users into discrete pain points and offer solutions.

PMs are not essential for B2B. An engineer can talk directly to the customer. Remember back when devs were called programmer/analysts? Exactly for that.

[arcturus17]

> Remember back when devs were called programmer/analysts? Exactly for that.

I remember, and I am business PM or business analyst and full-stack developer. Like I said in another comment replying to GP, I can totally see why many orgs separate the roles. It's messy. I need to fit the following activities in my schedule:

- Doing user research / speaking to customers

- Project management

- Basic UX, up to wireframing

- Design-as-I-code skills

- And of course, full-stack development, with all that this entails

Let me tell you, it can get crazy. I wouldn't change it for anything because I love being a generalist, but I'm surprised I cope sometimes. I have about 12 years of experience where I've done PM/BA, dev, or both at the same time and I often feel I haven't reached 70% of my potential.

I also hire devs and would only maybe trust 1 in 10 with this breadth of responsibilities. It's not that they aren't smart enough - some are infinitely smarter than me -, it's that they haven't been exposed to this breadth of tasks. Many of them wouldn't want to, either.

The roles have been separated because specialization is a law of nature in many contexts.

[ghaff]

>PMs are not essential for B2B.

It depends how you want to split things up. You can almost certainly move PM duties into other roles. Product Marketing can (and often does) handle competitive analysis and pricing. Engineers can certainly spend a chunk of their time meeting with customers, talking with the field, etc. But it will take time away from engineering.

[sarchertech]

In my experience the overhead of adding the additional layer of indirection is almost never worth it. Engineers have to spend nearly as much time meeting with product as they would meeting directly with customers. And so much gets lost in translation that I would almost always meet directly with customers.

When I first started we had business analysts, subject matter experts, and customers that we talked to. Replacing those with PMs has not been beneficial from what I’ve seen.

[spamizbad]

I feel like most PMs in a B2B contexts are basically just Business Analysts. Which generally aren’t getting comped at the level of Product Managers who theoretically are supposed to be “mini CEOs”

This is really where I think the wheels came off cart for the role, because PMs are rarely given a significant degree of autonomy and are usually just a cog in the broader product org.

[xyzelement]

In my job search a few years ago I was shocked at how different the PM scope was across companies. Some places "got it" and were looking for a mini CEO. Others basically wanted someone to run the Jira board.

The comp for the role was a great way to tell what was what. Nearly a 10x difference from Jira monkey to mini CEO

[gedy]

> PMs are essenial for B2C. You need to abstract a huge mass of end-users into discrete pain points and offer solutions.

Maybe at some level, but I've also seen talented UX and front end/UI engineers idling away being fingers for PMs who just focus their days spoon feeding tasks to teams without involving them in solutions. I left a supposed startup earlier this year due to this.