[gjmulhol]

I sense a lot of hostility toward product managers here, and I don't know why. I could understand why, as a developer, someone would not want a bad product manager, but a good one should make a developer's life easier.

Developers are the ones who should be coming up with ideas about HOW to do things. Make something more efficient? Dev. Implement an incredible new technical feature? Dev.

Product Managers are the ones who talk to the customer and steward non-technical vision. They are the bridge between sales people—who are incentivized to say yes to every customer request—and developers—who in most cases do not have the time to be thinking about what a customer might want, doing customer interviews, etc. Product managers are there to avoid the lukewarm tea problem, to adhere to a coherent version of a product, and to help coordinate the many parties who have an interest in seeing a product succeed but who might have different perspectives on what that means.

Some places that have Product Managers (or Product Somethings (editors, gurus, swamis, whatever)): Apple, Google, Dropbox, Box, Evernote, Square (they exist, I know some who fill these roles), Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, Spotify, and many others. These people not only exist but also are a central communication hub if they are doing their jobs right. Today's shining stars of PM are Apple (for hardware), Google, and Facebook. Everyone wants to hire people away from those teams.

The thing that bothers me about the other comments on this thread is the attitude of superiority that some people are taking: "if you aren't a dev/engineer/technical person, you aren't worth shit." Sure, in some companies, technical ability is all you need. But in most, particularly anything of reasonable size, you need a variety of people. Developers are not lawyers or finance people. In many cases, developers don't want to interview customers or aren't good at it. Developers are GREAT at developing (at least some are, others are complete clowns who have no ideas what they are doing), they chose to develop, but a company is so much more than development.

A great team--across all roles--is what makes a company great, and that includes product managers.

[inthewoods]

Great comment - totally agree with the hostility point.

The best product managers are like the best point guards in basketball. They see the whole court, deliver the ball right into the hands of the person who can score at the right moment. Unfortunately, most PMs are like characters in Office Space.

My theory about why their aren't many PMs out there: it's a shitty job. I was a PM for around 10 years, but I left it because it's just not a great job in most orgs. More specifically, it is generally a job of "no" as opposed to a job of "yes", and is a job that lacks any real authority in most cases.

[olegious]

What do you now?

[insidepitch]

"Some places that have Product Managers (or Product Somethings (editors, gurus, swamis, whatever)): Apple, Google, Dropbox, Box, Evernote, Square (they exist, I know some who fill these roles), Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, Spotify, and many others. These people not only exist but also are a central communication hub if they are doing their jobs right. Today's shining stars of PM are Apple (for hardware), Google, and Facebook. Everyone wants to hire people away from those teams."

Where are you getting your info? Apple has no Product Managers. It has lots of Project Managers and Product Marketing Managers but not Product Managers as you describe them. What products to build (from high level vision down to fine details) is decided by primarily Engineering and Design (for both hw and sw).

[gjmulhol]

Apple has Engineering Program Managers which manage the product build. Sure, vision and design are provided by others, by the EPM (and other titles I'm sure) are communication cruxes.

What products to build is decided by the exec team. What they look like is determined by industrial design. Engineering has little to no say in what actually gets built.

The idea that someone with the title Product Manager is going to be making a final decision on product vision is pretty narrow minded. Google does have Product Managers, but it has many on every product. Just because you are not managing an entire product line does not mean you are not managing product. I think once you get outside Tim Cook and Jony Ive (and maybe a few select others) at Apple, you are too low on the totem pole to be able to make any sort of long term product visioning decision.

Edit: And if you disagree about Apple, fine, I will rescind that example and continue to assert that product managers are very important in most organizations to balance the preferences of many players in trying to make a product a success.

[codeonfire]

Really you don't know why? Product management is the embodiment of the idea that man should not be allowed to control what he or she makes. It's the idea that the maker's role should be reduced to mere mechanical typists because we have all these other people that so badly want to be in control and make all the decisions, but dammit they just can't be bothered and are too important to do all the difficult parts like actually making the thing. Not surprisingly, everyone except engineers likes this idea.

[mattyfo]

I think your product managers are doing it all wrong. They should be showing up with "this is the problem we've identified" and asking how the makers can solve it. Product management looses out big when they show up with "this is the solution we demand".

[codeonfire]

Yes, that would be great. Unfortunately there is no incentive at all for product managers to have that sort of positive and forward thinking attitude or working relationship with engineering. Instead, 99.9% of product managers have every political incentive to take the approach of 'I have the word manager in my job title therefore I am everyone's boss and they must work to meet my demands' Inexperienced engineers won't challenge this and every other person on the team loves the idea that engineers are their underlings, so that becomes the culture and work environment.