[polote]

Sorry if you took it personally or you think this is a rant. This is clearly not the case, I can repeat it, PM have a lot of value, but there is one specific area that we shouldn't give them control over.

It doesnt mean they are bad PM or good PM, innovation requires just fundamentally opposed skills to the standard product management ones that we see in books.

[llamaLord]

I didn't take anything personally. IMO your implication that I did just feels like another attempt to straw-man PM's.

Trust me, we deal with so much psuedo-emotional garbage every day that stuff like this just slides off our backs.

My point is that you obviously don't actually understand what a PM's job is, so you probably shouldn't be telling everyone what they can and cannot do.

As a PM I've been the one that's lead some of the largest and most successful innovation focused initiatives that the companies I've worked at have ever delivered. In some cased delivering revenue uplifts totaling 20-30% of the companies entire income.

Engineers don't have a monopoly on innovation. Innovation is what happens when a great solution is paired with a nasty problem. For at least one half of that calculus, most companies need good PM's.

[haswell]

> but there is one specific area that we shouldn't give them control over.

This is a bit like encountering an engineer who isn’t very good (or maybe it’s just a lack of experience) and then concluding that the engineering org should not be allowed to control architecture based on that experience.

Or encountering a dev team who goes off and builds some complex feature that no one asked for and then concluding that dev teams should never have a say in what should be built.

The existence of bad PMs or bad devs (or good PMs/devs executing a misguided plan) shouldn’t be used to justify a general sweeping argument about either discipline.

[bigbillheck]

Going by this article and the rest of your writings it's hard for me to think that this 'one specific area that we shouldn't give them control over' isn't really 'whatever area polote happens to be in right now.'