[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.