[jasontheknight]

This article boils down to "if you hire mediocre people then you get mediocre results". This is true for all disciplines. But, the biggest problem here is not poor product managers (although that often is a problem) but poor-FIT product managers. Anyone hiring a career Google or Amazon PM to manage products at an early-stage, sales-led B2B supply chain startup is almost certainly committing hiring malpractice. That's not to say that the PM isn't any good, or can't adapt, but I wouldn't trust the hirer to make a good decision one little bit.

Problems with PMs generally boil down to "they're not very technical" (mostly irrelevant, because there's much more to being a successful PM than being arbitrarily "technical"), "they're just a project manager"/"they're just a status update monkey", which does happen depressingly often. However, this "prod-ject manager" archetype is generally something imposed on the PM by a company that has no interest in having anyone do actual product management work. The "all metrics all the time" people do, of course, exist. There's a place for them in bigger companies that are primarily optimising what they've got, but they won't last 5 minutes at a lot of companies.

So much of what people criticise as bad product management (or, but extension, bad product managers) is actually a systemic lack of product management at all. Leaders hire the wrong type of people for a role they have no interest in supporting, with inevitable results. However, are we expecting that these same leaders are going to make A-grade hires in engineering? In my experience, the engineers who complain most about product managers are the ones that would benefit from (good) product management the most.