[alphazard]

Everyone who has worked in tech should reflect on the fact that it would be shocking to see a product manager produce a spec for the behavior of a feature, or a spreadsheet with discounted value analysis as in TFA. Those are both artifacts that aid in decision making, and especially aid in making the kind of decisions that product orgs have taken from other more qualified people at a company. Unfortunately, product management has become an imposter role, a side door into tech companies for people who can't contribute to the sales, financial, or technical parts of the business. They would just be bloat if that was where it stopped, but these imposter roles task themselves with making important decisions, at the company's expense.

Like the author, I've found some success in forcing accountability, to the point that imposters hand off decisions to someone who can legitimately navigate to a solution. A lingering problem is that business decision making isn't about one-time decisions, it's about decision making rate. As long as poor decision makers can retain their position in the critical loop, they will impede the ability of the business to function. The solution is building the organization around accountability and consequences for misallocating the company's resources: setting up a system where the organization tends towards competent decision makers gaining influence, and incompetent decision makers losing influence or leaving.

[drooby]

I was spoiled at my first company out of college. My director cared deeply about product specs, acceptance criteria, and making sure engineers actually understood product and business decisions. It was so nice.

Oh, how sweet and naive I was to the world… hahah.

It still blows my mind that product isn’t treated like a soft engineering discipline in its own right. When product doesn’t do its own thinking, the cognitive load shifts to engineering. Suddenly, engineers are doing parts of product’s job. The result is predictable: engineering gets stretched thin, and both Product and Engineering fail to fully document or even understand what they’ve built.

The project falls apart because Product drops the ball, but Engineering is the team at the end of the funnel, so the blame naturally tends to land on them. Product’s output is often hidden, and it’s easy for them to say, “Well, we did our part. Engineering just didn’t deliver.”

[Seattle3503]

> The project falls apart because Product drops the ball, but Engineering is the team at the end of the funnel, so the blame naturally tends to land on them. Product’s output is often hidden, and it’s easy for them to say, “Well, we did our part. Engineering just didn’t deliver.”

I've seen this get worse with LLMs. I've had specs that were wholly or in significant part generated by ChatGPT, but they look detailed so the are plausible workslop. I've been given a spreadsheet with nonsense items "Implement adaptive intent-driven workflows across user touchpoints" (I generated this example with GPT).

When I asked what any of it meant I was met with silence. Later through the grapevine I hear the requirements were generated by ChatGPT and the guy responsible for them doesn't understand the system at all. But guess who is responsible for delivery?

[master_crab]

Any product person who hasn’t had years of engineering or sales needs to be taken out back and treated like Old Yeller (metaphorically of course). If you can’t deeply associate with the customer or comprehend the engineering of systems, you are not fit to be in the flow from keyboard to customer.

[gubicle]

The (relatively big and successful) tech company I work at, has gradually seen ~all high level decision-making positions filled with PMs, while senior engineers who have been at the company for years are being pushed out and/or leaving. Most of these PMs have very little understanding of the tech, the market, or how software engineering works, yet they now make ~all of the product decisions at the company. I haven't worked on anything remotely useful, or bottom-line impactful in 2 years. I was originally very optimistic about the company and elected to get paid in as much stock (vs cash) as possible... which I now realize was a big mistake.

[travelalberta]

I thank the stars every day that my direct manager is an actual engineer.

[MrDarcy]

I’ve struggled for a decade to pin down my frustration with most product owners and it’s this at the root. They are often true imposters. At a startup they are shielded by CEO founders who beat the imposter syndrome drum, giving legitimacy to their incompetence.

[amelius]

But somehow nobody is calling them out for it.

I suppose they quickly choose the side of the user, saying "you don't have to convince me, I'm just playing the user role here".

[alphazard]

I've also heard this quite a lot. If they've never actually had to use the product or similar products in a professional setting, where their results mattered, then they aren't qualified to play the part of the user.

If the product has actual users, it's always better to talk to them directly, than to trust the opinions of someone who doesn't use the product to generate value every day.

[alphazard]

A whole generation has come up thinking that it's normal for the direction of the product to be guided by the dumbest, least competent people in the room. Pretty much every tech company has, or aspires to have a product org.

The best intuition pump I have for product managers is the analogy of hedge fund managers. There exist people who can predict the market, just like there exist people who can predict how a product or feature is received by the market. Most people claiming to can't. The people who can are expensive. You can't reliably train white collar workers to be hedge fund managers, and you can't reliably train white collar workers to lead product development.

That mostly encapsulates all of the "but this guy at Apple" objections that get thrown around by people defending product orgs, as if they were a business insight that most of us don't yet understand.

[pols45]

Competence is not magic.

There are unpredictable and complex problems that competence can't solve - see The Theory of Bounded Rationality.

So what happens when the "competent" can't solve what falls in their lap given constraints like resources/time/team etc?

They will either say we can't do it (someone else like Trump will put up his hand immediately and say but I can, I can do anything, Hilary is just a clown choose me). Or they will say we need to buy more time/resources/team etc.

The point here is - if they can't fend of the Opportunists and if they can't buy more time/resources etc by themselves but end up being reliant on some one that can easily be framed as incompetence and will be framed as such by Opportunists.

So you want to change the game, be honest about what "competent" people do when faced with unpredictability and complexity ie understand their limits. They generally exit the space. And others fill the space.

[alphazard]

I think we are just using the word competence differently. It's not an innate quality. It's an observed quality. I would define it as the ability to perform a task well.

Flipping a coin has no skill component, it's all chance. It's impossible to be competent at flipping a coin. Poker has a skill component. A single hand is mostly luck, but repeated hands tend to result in the same few players having more at the end. That is observable evidence that poker has a skill component, and it make sense to call people with that skill "competent at poker".

If a problem is complex or unpredictable, then there will be a luck component, but chain enough of those together (like over the course of a few quarters at a company), and the luck washes out leaving a skill signal.

The short-term noise actually helps those in imposter roles hide their lack of competence. It's like a poker player that never bets, and decays their bankroll slowly enough that no one really notices. Then through politics they are able to get a refill, and stay at the table to let it slowly decay again.

[nerdponx]

When somebody incompetent is hired to do a job, do you blame the incompetent person, or the person who hired the incompetent person?

[marcosdumay]

On this case, probably the person that decided to split the job that way or the person that decided that somebody must be hired.