[allsunny]

Confusing article. “We should get rid of the PM role” but also “We still need people dedicated to do PM things… but don’t call them PMs, they’re just everyday great people.” I feel like the author had a bad experience working with a PM (the MBA comment is telling) and now wants to throw the baby out with the bath water. Business scale creates + requires role specialization. Sure, there are shitty PMs, and it’s a hard job, but I’d be super disappointed to lose my team’s PM.

[sfteus]

Definitely sounds like a bad PM experience, especially with the repeated insistence about handing control of the company over to the PM.

Maybe I just have good experiences with PMs? At my company they're there to figure out what customers want and what the product should deliver, and then with our EMs to balance that with what's technically feasible and what we have capacity to implement. If an EM says "there's no way we can do that on this timeline" the PM works out some alternative plan for the product.

[sanderjd]

Yeah the "handing control of the company over" thing struck me as odd as well. I haven't ever seen that particular problem.

In the good cases I've seen, it's just as you describe, with EMs and PMs working together with high trust to get to a decent level of consensus between them, and then parlaying that consensus into leadership buy in for their roadmap.

In the bad cases, there is some breakdown in trust between the EM, PM, or leadership. Or, worse, between the EM and their team.

But I haven't run into this thing where the PM reigns supreme, above the leadership team.

[sarchertech]

Handing the company over to PMs is a very common problem I’ve seen at smaller startups.

It’s generally not that they are above the leadership team, but that that the leadership team have abdicated responsibility for product development to the head of product.

[sanderjd]

Interesting. I'll take your word for it. I'm glad I haven't seen that.

[SkyPuncher]

My company is product led. That means PMs have huge influence on what gets built. The how is still left to the engineers.

I think it works pretty well. We ship a lot of great stuff.

[sanderjd]

I think what I described is system where PMs have huge influence on what gets built. But also a system where engineering and strategic leadership also do. Personally that seems like the the balance to me. I think all three things - tactical product decisions, execution decisions, and strategic decisions - are important and separate.

[rsynnott]

An extremely common organisational leadership failure mode is “[role/thing] is useless, get rid of it… Ooops, we actually needed that. Bring it back, but call it something else so that we don’t have to admit our mistake.”

The author has, apparently, decided to skip the intermediate step and just rename things for no reason.

[grvdrm]

Also, bring it back but don’t call it that and maybe we can get by paying someone less to do the same work.

[Wurdan]

It also says that you just build teams where everyone is amazing (good luck pulling off that piece of recruiting magic) and then says “… give them good problems to solve…” Who exactly does the author think should decide what problems the team should prioritize? That is the primary responsibility of the PM role. Seems like the author has indeed just had a bad experience with a PM who failed at that.

[Twirrim]

I've been lucky to work with a series of really good product managers, with one exception who thankfully didn't last long enough to do too much damage (though he did result in me having to attend the single most awkward meeting I've ever had to attend, where right from the top, and throughout the entire hour, he was demonstrating to his skip level manager that he really didn't understand the product at all, and the skip level did).

They help us out a lot by understanding what the customers want, what we can provide, what time lines are sane, handling interacting with legal and business interests galore, and I help them out when they need to check in on technical sides of things. Teams rarely lack for ideas of things they can build, ways they can improve the product or operational experience. A product manager tries to make sure you build the right thing.

[FireBeyond]

I truly wish (and I know some do) that MBA programs had an industry experience prerequisite.

I have 20 years IT experience. I'm a PM. I'm looking to do an MBA for knowledge, learning about more formal business understanding, etc., and to help as I advance.

The PMs I know who are similar don't get an MBA and immediately start playing fuckfuck games (to borrow from military parlance). It's those who went high school > college > MBA > managerial role, without a day's experience in the field except maybe a brief internship half way through their undergrad.

[kirso]

I never understood black and white thinking such as OP.

“Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.” - Morgan Housel

Its the same with dating. If you date toxic people, you start generalising that all men are abusive.

Same with PMs. If you are working within a company that accepts subpar talent, you'll start seeing things based on your benchmark of quality. Until you actually work with a great PM that makes your life easier.

There are good engineers and bad engineers.

This polarisation is IMO an incredible bias.

[d0gsg0w00f]

Yeah, and then they go on to say that all of the great sages weren't PM's, just great people.

I disagree. All of those greats that were mentioned succeeded because they kept the customer and the product tantamount to all else. So really they were just fantastic PM's.