[CoffeeDregs]

Comments seems to be confusing Project Management, Product Management and Product Marketing Management. Those specializations don't often exist in small companies, but definitely arise in larger companies.

To the folks denigrating Product Management: it's a very difficult job; and some pretty crappy people get into it when they don't like marketing and can't do software development. That doesn't mean that Product Management is worthless...

As a developer, when you build a software feature, you have to keep in mind how this little or large feature will affect the system in the future: hack it together now or build it for real. Neither track is inherently good/bad, but bad developers pick a path without understanding the near-, mid- and long-term effects.

Having been a good PM [IMO], the real key was the ability to balance product requirements now against their long term affects: spot features we needed to build now to support another in-development feature; prevent features from being built which would hamstring us in the future. I had the good fortune to return to a former employer and see that: investing in a feature had paid off a ton even though the other PMs had opposed building it; my failed request that we not build certain features had, in fact, produced a quagmire in which we discovered a misset-for-years setting which produced a -15% offset in revenue. Anyone can look at a market and say "hey, we need this little Feature X"; the harder part is realizing that the little dropdown required for Feature X is going to fundamentally alter the perception of your product and kill your sales...

[benjamincburns]

> That doesn't mean that Product Management is worthless...

> the real key was the ability to balance product requirements now against their long term affects

The problem is that a lot of companies are structured so that this is impossible for their PMs to accomplish.

Good employees (PMs or otherwise) will always find away to be effective in spite of the organization. However, if product management is too much under the thumb of sales, or if they are too much under the thumb of development and disconnected from sales, they don't have the visibility they need into one end or the other. Further, there will be pressure from their bosses to advocate more for their side.

To me, the best PMs are good mediators. Not only do they know how to schedule requirements and decide scope, they know how to communicate that effectively, and get buy-in from both sales and development with a minimum of squabbling. Because of this, if they're capable of doing their job effectively they don't need sales or development to report directly to them, and likewise they shouldn't be reporting to either sales or development.

If leadership feels the need to put product management under sales or under development, chances are they need to hire new PMs.

I completely agree though that good PMs are rare, exceedingly difficult to hire for, and worth double their weight in gold.

[CoffeeDregs]

    >The problem is that a lot of companies are structured so that this
    >is impossible for their PMs to accomplish.

Would love to hear more about this since I'm going to be structuring the engineering, and possibly product, teams for the startup I joined...

    >get buy-in from both sales and development

Totally. People often rant about Sales or Marketing or Engineering, but none exists without the other. I think the combination of deep technical skills and a two year tour of duty in Sales (as a Field Applications Engineer) provided me with the ability to pre-understand each sides' concerns and to communicate with each more effectively.

    >If leadership feels the need to put product management under sales
    >or under development, chances are they need to hire new PMs.

Yeah, I've seen this first hand two separate times and the constant refrain from the rest of the company was "why isn't engineering building what our customer's need?" I do wonder if it's possible. Or advisable. Might be something that goes bad no matter how well it starts.

[rrrx3]

Product Management is its own thing. It doesn't really belong under either of those. Keeping in mind that org charts influence thinking - rightly or wrongly - you'd be putting Product Management in a no-win situation when they're meant to act as intermediaries between engineering and sales.

I'm just joined a startup where Product is its own arm. We sync with Sales and Engineering, but we push products based on smart decisions. It wasn't always that way, from what I hear, and it was a slog to get there, but so far from what I've experienced, it's been well worth it. There's still some work to do, but it's vastly different from orgs I've been in before, where Product fell under something else and had little clout to do what needed to be done.

[crimsonalucard]

All of your requirements for a good PM mean that the PM needs to have the skills to be a developer as well. It's probably why some companies aren't hiring for PMs anymore because only an engineer will have the technical foresight required to perform adequately.

[CoffeeDregs]

    >All of your requirements for a good PM mean that the
    >PM needs to have the skills to be a developer as well.

I somewhat agree. The best PMs I've seen have had technical backgrounds, so a technical background seems necessary, but it is not sufficient. The best PMs have had a deep understanding of customer need, company/product direction, development feasibility. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7830892 said "president of the product" and I think that's nice. Given the invisibility of corporate "presidents", I'd suggest "CEO of the product" since you've got to have the ability to review the smallest issue while considering the long term effects.

Years ago, I was friends with the CEO of an hot CPU startup and I asked him what had most surprised him about his job. He was formerly the VP of a division of a public semiconductor company, so had serious experience. And still he said that he was astounded at the range of questions he got asked: VP of Finance raising some technical accounting issue; VP of Hardware knocking on his door to discuss process nodes and vendors; VP of Software looking for advice on ways to solve a complex problem; HR Director raising sexual harassment policies. Barring the sexual harassment policy, yeah, that sounds about like Product Management [and, yes, you will bump into "revenue recognition" while a PM].

EDIT:

... derp ... I missed this:

    >only an engineer will have the technical foresight
    >required to perform adequately

I think this was covered above, but I did want to address this particularly engineering-centric perspective. There are supremely bad engineers-turned-PMs because they think PM is Eng+[some vague management-y ring they should try to catch]. (There are also supremely bad marketers-turned-PMs... but we all know that...) Don't get lulled into thinking that you can be a good PM merely because you're an engineer. [You'll suck and be frustrated. And companies have huge problems with people doing jobs they shouldn't be doing, so be an awesome engineer/developer and you will be richly rewarded.]

The worst part of being a PM is that you won't be as skilled as your audience. You'll propose features, but you won't be as good at development as the developers who'll develop them, the salespeople who'll sell them, the marketers who'll market them. But you need to be good enough in any domain to call bullshit on any of them because everyone will be a passive-aggressive sand-bagger when they don't like your requests. [Once, as a PM, I proposed a feature and then, since I also had SVN access, built it in 3 hours. Was approached as I was building the feature. The Dir Eng was telling another PM the feature would take 3 days to build. Sand-baggers suck and developers sand-bag, too...]