Is that not a straight up engineering job? A good chunk of "engineer school" is practicing "customer has an issue, design a solution" type problems, in-between all the math.
Customers are rarely able to express their underlying issue. They usually communicate what they think the solution is.
A good product person is able to drill down to the fundamental problem the customer really has and articulate that to engineers.
Also, good product people should be evaluating the customers problem in terms of the whole market.
After all, engineering is a limited resource. So you need to solve the problems that exist for your target market, not just a single customer.
Of course, I’ve seen good engineers who can do this, but it takes time and effort to sift through all of the customers issues and work out which ones to solve. So product managers are focused on this to free up the good engineers to design solutions to those problems.
>Customers are rarely able to express their underlying issue. They usually communicate what they think the solution is.
In my experience the vast majority of PMs do exactly this. Half of my job since I became a staff+ engineer almost a decade ago is taking “solutions” from product managers and trying to figure out what they really want.
A lot of traditional engineering (civil, mechanical, etc) are non-competitive endeavors. For example, if you are supposed to make a bridge, you just design what you think a good bridge to be.
In the modern consumer application, you have to understand business concepts like differentiation. If your product is very good, but it’s strictly worse than another product in every dimension, you don’t get any credit for second place. You actually get close to zero sales because no consumer chooses your product over the alternative, in contrast to a “bad” product that does at least something very well in a niche.
Clearly there’s a difference between building a bridge and getting customers to use your free app, but the vast majority of Engineers aren’t working in big infrastructure projects. Even the ones who do are competing with everyone else who bids on the project.
And in software there are plenty of cases where the 2nd or 3rd place product gets tons of sales even if it’s strictly worse in every category. There are so many things that impact market success that are completely out of the hands of product or engineering.
This doesn’t sound like any university CS degree I know of, apart from maybe a single class actually called “software engineering”, which in many cases isn’t even required
And even if it was, no, engineer personalities are horrible at designing solutions that actually meet customers’ and the business’s needs
The engineering classes I took were full of stories and problems centered around solving erroneous customer reports. A good example is the ice cream story [0], where a customer reports their car malfunctioning when they buy the wrong kind of ice cream, which was used as an introduction to root causing techniques. That specific story is apocryphal and the manufacturer varies, but there's an entire mythology of such stories being used to introduce topics / provide "realistic" problems / do design projects for students.
This sort of stuff is a not-insignificant portion of my job as well, since PMs rarely have the technical skills to know what's feasible as a solution anyway in my experience.
Good Product people don't just build exactly what the customer described as their problem. They understand that sometimes there's a better way to solve it. In "engineering school", you can't tell your professor "I understand what you're actually trying to achieve, so I built X instead of Y because I think it'll be better for you".
Product figures out what to build, and Engineering figures out how.
Sure you can. I’ve literally had classes that worked exactly like that. I had classes where I had to interview and observe actual customers using our product.
What you’re describing is a huge part of engineering. Engineers have been doing this long before Product Managers existed. When I started, software engineers used to just talk directly to customers, domain experts, business analysts, and business leaders.
At “product led companies” the engineers just end up trying to figure out what the product manager actually wants because it’s not really possible in most cases to separate the what from the how.
Having worked with both systems, I don’t think the way it works now is better.
A good product person is able to drill down to the fundamental problem the customer really has and articulate that to engineers.
Also, good product people should be evaluating the customers problem in terms of the whole market.
After all, engineering is a limited resource. So you need to solve the problems that exist for your target market, not just a single customer.
Of course, I’ve seen good engineers who can do this, but it takes time and effort to sift through all of the customers issues and work out which ones to solve. So product managers are focused on this to free up the good engineers to design solutions to those problems.