[switch007]

Why has every product person I've worked with been obsessed with controlling teams and communication rather than obsessing over the customer and the market?

Friends say the same thing too. It makes me roll my eyes whenever someone retorts "you just need to hire the /good/ PMs"

Even my worst sales/tech colleagues, I've never had as much conflict and annoyance as with product people

[leoedin]

I've seen "product" done badly at multiple companies. I've still not seen it done very well. I think the problem is structural. Of all the areas of software development process that get cargo culted without careful consideration of actual effect, product management is the worst (with "scrum" a close second!)

Someone in management decides that "we need to be product led" and appoints a product manager or owner. They then either spend their time micro managing the development process, or making unrealistic goals which don't take into account the development team at all.

I have sometimes seen good product managers - people who are engaged enough with the development process to understand the state of things, and can suggest the right direction to take development work to meet external requirements. The problem seems to be that there's not an effective selection process for them. When an organisation is "product led" that makes the product manager a de-facto team leader (regardless of what people say) which makes it very hard for the developers to hold them accountable. There's limited objective metrics you can hire them against, and the person who does hire them is often their manager - less motivated by development productivity than by the appearance of productivity.

[jiggywiggy]

It's just hard in general. So it will feel messy from the inside.

[anonreeeeplor]

I’ve seen this in dealing with Microsoft. Product Managers at these companies all have a type A personality in general. If you want excessive politics and everyone fighting and being a dumb ass it’s the product managers at big companies.

I’m not sure if product managers at small companies and startups act this way.

At the larger companies the people who spend all their time fighting for power seem to be product managers.

It doesn’t make sense at all to me why these people get specifically hired and put into these roles. Because people who want power are defined by the trait of not listening and that is exactly what a Product manager is supposed to be an expert at: Listening.

So you hire people who are guaranteed not to be good at listening and of course you get really bad results.

I think most of these product managers choose these roles because they are more interested in power. Or their managers want power.

[aqme28]

> I’m not sure if product managers at small companies and startups act this way.

Ten years of experience at various startups, and it is absolutely this way.

[edgyquant]

It’s worse. PMs have a tendency to try and creep their way into CEO at startups.

[brookst]

You’re aware that Microsoft didn’t even have a Product Manager title until last year, right?

[allenu]

I worked there for 13 years and worked with a lot of people with the title of Product Manager, or "PM" to be specific. And no, we didn't call them "project managers".

[brookst]

How did you work there for 13 years and not realize that Microsoft “PM” was neither product nor project, but “Program”?

It was a hybrid role that every org did differently, and it was confusing to everyone and made it hard to separate product focus from execution focus.

Last year they split the roles into Product Manager and Technical Program Manager (TPM), and PM’s had to elect which role/title/path to choose.

This is at least true for the Experiences and Devices and Cloud and AI orgs.

Source: work there now, have been there 6 years.

[allenu]

Ah, you got me there. My apologies. You're right. I had forgotten that it was "program" and not "product". (I haven't worked there in a few years and probably mixed it up with product manager titles at a different company.)

To me, it always felt like it was supposed to be an intentional "product" role as opposed to "project", but you're right that it basically was a hybrid where they worked on product but also helped manage the project itself.

[SQueeeeeL]

Because those skills require actual experience and domain-expertice. You can't factory print MBAs that actually give you skills, but you can create the illusion of value by teaching something, so they throw out a bunch of random econ and ways to control employees and everything gets a little bit worse everytime someone graduates

[perrygeo]

This. Some product folks know their industry well and have actual hands-on experience building something in the same ballpark. They are a joy to work with. Even if they don't do their job particularly well, you can ask them real questions and trust them to make reasonable decisions. They have an intuitive sense of what does and doesn't work for the target audience.

Product folks who don't have domain experience always seem to fail, no matter how hard they work. Their opinion is not trustworthy on important topics. To compensate for their obvious lack of merit, they HUSTLE. They fall into the trap of crowd-sourcing ideas, insisting on design patterns that make no sense, and micromanaging a project to death with story points. They pathologically avoid any tough decisions (because deep down they know they don't have the skill or knowledge to make them) and prefer to focus on small tractable tickets that they show visible progress. No matter how well they run their processes, their lack of domain experience will almost ensure poor quality.

[rjbwork]

Unfortunately, domain experience is no panacea. Dealing with product people that don't understand technology but do understand the domain is equally as frustrating.

[testTED]

Those with the domain expertise stay away because of this culture.

[passwordoops]

I got into product management maybe 10 years ago. At that time, it was more the bridge between sales and engineering, and you manage the technical marketing. You let each department work the way they work best and the roadmap is collaborative. Some places still have that but they are dwindling.

But I'd say over the past 5 years or so, wherever I go the expectation is that the PM must put their nose in everything and I'd have to gently, if diplomatically explain why that's dumb. I think it's the whole "the PM is the CEO of the product" which is stupid. The CEO is the CEO.

Take a look at most PM job adverts now. The expectations are insane and something only a go-getting type A MBA control-freak type would go for, with the expecting that you play an intimate role in low-level architecture decisions to leading webinars with end-users and everything in-between.

Who wants that? I might as well go start a company.

Terrible blog post BTW. Poorly written and badly developed arguments

[lovehashbrowns]

They think it’s their micromanagement that creates productivity. Sometimes it’s incentivized by upper management. The more noise they make the better they seem. So for example, a micromanaging PM will demand that all communication go through them. It can certainly help, but oftentimes adding a third person to a loop complicates things, not helps. Now there are three schedules to align! But the PM has to seem busy and productive so it’s better for them to be involved when it comes to optics, productivity be damned.

And god help you if your product is technical and your PM isn’t technical or knowledgeable enough. Conversations get fun when the PM says something wrong and you’re now trying to correct them “respectfully” in front of customers.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Every product person I’ve ever worked with in depth has been obsessed over the customer and the market, and if anything they tend to get frustrated when circumstances require them to think about internal communication instead. I don’t know where the gap comes from but I can testify that the good PMs people are telling you about do exist.

[Avshalom]

>> customer

As we all know from agile it's impossible for a customer to know what they want and it's the programmers job to talk to them to figure it out anyway

>> market

As Heynren Grufford said: the market can want a faster horse for longer than you can be where the puck will be

So they focus on what they think they can control.

[marcinzm]

>"you just need to hire the /good/ PMs"

No, you need to hire good EMs to provide checks and balances. Any system without checks and balances will go off the rails at any moderate scale no matter what you do.

[icedchai]

Many "product" managers are actually lower level project managers. Some companies don't know the difference.