[kerblang]

Product owner/manager often works out fine as an informal position, where certain people in leadership roles are making decisions because they have an excellent aptitude for doing such; they especially have the ability to understand and empathize with their user base.

That works fine until it stops working, and then it works horribly, because engineers have asserted themselves as antagonistic product owners: I know what customers want! And they just plain don't. Things can go completely insane. It boggles my mind how badly some otherwise competent folks can botch this.

I didn't even realize how important this role was until I was working with people who clearly had no business asserting themselves into it, and I'd rather have someone less technical doing it than an engineer who is awful at it.

[dasil003]

You're calling out one specific failure mode: engineering speaking for product (and possibly design, research, data science, etc). But that's just one of many, and in my experience product speaking for engineering is more common and more dangerous. It can lead to complete gridlock and dead sea effect over time if it goes uncorrected.

[mountainriver]

> And they just plain don't. Things can go completely insane. It boggles my mind how badly some otherwise competent folks can botch this.

This hit home with me, I’ve seen some of the smartest engineers fall into this trap. They seem to believe their great engineering skills translate directly to product management.

It can be one of the worst possible outcomes for a product and company

[thunkshift1]

Statistically speaking you are wrong.. can you list five tech products that became big after the PM types you talk about took over the product?

[thunkshift1]

I think this take is rather disingenuous, especially the tech vs non-tech comparison you mentioned. Most, if not all, of the market winning products have come from tech founders/engineers. So tech people actually do know things better about what customers want. Its when the product has gained traction and it goes beyond a certain inflection point that these non tech pm types swoon in. They hype up tropes about tech folks lacking people skills or not knowing how to deal with customers. This is ultimately self serving for them because then they get to sit in the very lucrative position between the customers and a growing product, without actually doing any of the hard work involved in getting the product tech stack up and running and fine tuned.

[kerblang]

I'm not saying engineers can't do the job; many engineers certainly are capable of working as product owners, and in most cases startup founders are their own product owners, regardless of ability (for better/worse, but usually for better if they're succeeding).

Rather, the point is that it's an extraordinarily critical function and not something to assume everyone is just good at because they say so or because they're "smart" in some sense.

[thunkshift1]

Its not so much about smartness, its about knowing what is the right move to make. That some one who isnt familiar with the product internals or the market knows better than the founders/engineers because of some innate ability is a bit far fetched