[hn_throwaway_99]

I heard a statement before a lot of the big tech layoffs were in full swing: "There were a lot of low-interest rate product managers in tech over the past couple years."

Don't get me wrong, I think product management is actually the hardest job in tech because it can straddle so many different areas: design, marketing, data analysis, customer relationships, project management, etc. etc. I still think great project managers are worth their weight in gold.

That said, I think great product managers are extremely rare, and many (most?) product managers are neutral or negative value adds. Reasons being:

1. Product managers need to be incredibly detail oriented. They should know every in-and-out, every edge condition of their product. I've found this level of detail-oriented-ness to be very rare. It can be one of the biggest causes of friction between engineering and product.

2. The best product managers have a good, basically innate sense of products and features that will work for users. This skill is incredibly rare.

3. I think most importantly, many product managers see themselves more as project managers: keep Jira boards up to date, coordinate with stakeholders, schedule meetings, etc. These types of product managers can do lots of work to look busy, but I'm usually like "yeah, I can schedule my own meetings."

So my point is I'm extremely skeptical of people that can do a 1-3 month boot camp and be good product managers (though, that said, I think the same thing of code bootcamps). I do think there are some "pipelines" to becoming product managers that should be strengthened, as I've seen some very good product managers come from being very detail-oriented and motivated QA or customer service folks.

But in general, I think the time of hoards of useless product managers is coming to an end.

[131012]

Care to give more details about your third point?

[solatic]

Secretaries only help create value insofar as they genuinely help take administrative workload off the shoulders of people whose skills are better put to use elsewhere. In the real world, you need engineers to communicate their own work, because there's a strong overlap between "people who can read and understand code" and "people who will earn more money with an engineering salary instead of a secretarial salary". By hiring someone else to push paper, you actually impede communication rather than improve it, because now there's an unnecessary stakeholder in the middle.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I actually think this other comment on this thread says it best: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36326151. I've worked with a bunch of "Tom from Office Space" product managers in my career.

I've seen lots of product managers who basically just "facilitate" between stakeholders (e.g. between engineering, business execs, and customers) but don't actually add much value to the primary job of product management, which should be defining, in detail, how the product should actually work.