[015a]

One thing I've been thinking more-and-more about recently:

People are unique; there's no doubt about that. But how much of "the product manager does product management" is genuinely just the title they're assigned, versus some innate capability they were born with?

I'm becoming more agreeable to the notion that, at least in product development: most people should be doing more things. People can and should have specialization; but maybe it should be more organic and nuanced, like "Mike is our API guy, but he's also pretty good at organizing large projects and if you've got a big architectural ick to work through definitely go talk to him" versus "Sarah is more on the product side, she'll have great insight into user experience and she knows who to talk to in the organization to get decisions made faster, but she can also take on some smaller frontend tickets."

My argument isn't really "great idea dude, let's get rid of titles"; because I think the critical part is, this mindset is deeply predicated on Agency. You need an organization that assigns High Definition and High Agency to teams. You also need a hiring process that, very specifically, treats Personal Agency as one of the most important qualities a candidate can have; you don't know Go, that's cool, we can teach you Go, what we can't teach you is the genuine desire to want to be taught Go, and Rust, and some language I haven't even heard of, and by the way you're interested in the overall business and revenue and such.

The obvious problem is, people like that are a vast minority, and maybe you can't really scale companies by relying on the people you hire being intelligent generalists. I think there's also something to be said in the force multiplication of technology. A room with five of the right people can be more effective and productive than a skyscraper of 500.

[pitched]

People with a lot of personal agency in this way will also slow things down by expecting rational decisions from management and asking questions when they aren’t. I think this makes for a fantastic partner, peer or co-worker but a horrible employee. So I don’t think it’s too surprising that most hiring managers will be actively filtering them out.

As someone who does very highly value this way of thinking though, how would you try to detect it in an interview setting as an interviewee? That’s like asking them if they have good culture.

[charlie0]

So the alternative is for management to be surrounded by "yes" people?

[pitched]

If that wasn’t pretty widely true, would the meme exist?

[charlie0]

I mean it is true, but I disagree with your prior comment that people with agency slow things down. It may appear that way, but really, they speed things up and the answer is simple. People with agency scale... a lot. If decision making is centralized, it's like communism, it might work at small scale, but won't past a certain point because the centralized points bottleneck the entire system to the point where it can't operate effectively.

[charlie0]

I 100% agree in a smaller company personal agency is huge. Setting the issue of scaling aside, it's very difficult finding people who just get sh*t done and problem solve, no matter what and where in the org. A big part is this has to be built into the org from inception. The other part is that training and encouragement must come from the top. I think more people can grow into having greater agency, but most don't because they tried and got no support and failed, or they actually succeeded but weren't rewarded and decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.