Show HN: Best and free resources to learn product management | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Best and free resources to learn product management

yilunzh.com

41 pointsyilunzh12 comments

Product management is fast becoming the garbage role of wannabe middle managers who lack expertise in engineering, design, or marketing. It's cute to put together a list of suggestions, but each of these areas are better handled by experts. After years as a PM I learned it was a role that was only nessecary when you have B level or worse talent that can't self manage or don't know what they are doing. In a team of A players no one needs a go-between pretending to have expertise and arbitraging credit while playing telephone.

I left my senior PM role to become a lead designer at Google and I have never once looked back. Now I take pride in having expertise derived from hands on work critical to a product along with my peers in engineering and marketing. My instincts for strategy are sharper than my former bumbling PMs who are in meetings all day. Product management is now fighting irrelevance as it continually strives for a purpose as they slump toward extinction.

The greatest tip you could give an aspiring PM is to quit and pursue a worthwhile role that contributes to the product in a meaningful way.

I agree that a PM who simply play the role of a telephone between design, engineering and marketing is indeed useless...though i disagree that PM in general add no value building product, even in a team of A players.

You work at google, and google is a place full of A players. It also happens to have hundreds if not thousands of product managers. Surely they are not there to just look pretty.

I can't speak for you, but from my own experience, I get into the weeds with engineers on technical tradeoff and debate over user experience with my designer on a daily basis. I run user testing, I scowl over metrics to understand what's working vs what's not. If that's not contributing to the product in a meaningful way, I don't know what is. I hope at some point, you get to work with a PM that is able to do that with you.

Most product managers, in my experience, greatly overestimate their own level of knowledge. Your whole post smacks of this too, and when you say you "get into the weeds" on technical tradeoffs, it's quite likely that you're wasting the engineers' time trying to debate things that are either utterly inconsequential or are obviously wrong to anyone with a basic grasp of the technology.

Also when you refer to engineers and designers as being "yours," this is a huge red flag. They are not your subordinates--at least not in any company that's worth working for. You would do yourself well not to think of them as such.

> when you say you "get into the weeds" on technical tradeoffs, it's quite likely that you're wasting the engineers' time trying to debate things that are either utterly inconsequential or are obviously wrong to anyone with a basic grasp of the technology.

Could you offer some additional insight on why you think that way?

> Also when you refer to engineers and designers as being "yours," this is a huge red flag.

I think you're reading too much into a common shorthand for "engineers who I work with".

People also say "my friends", "my family", "my workmates", "my boss", "my bus driver", "my doctor" and so on without implying subordination.

I truly value a PM/ Program manager hybrid type person if I'm on a big team that has to interface with other big teams, because I don't want to have to be calling up all these other devs to figure out what they need from me, what I need from then, how our roadmaps correspond, or even have to pay 100% attention in combined team meetings.

But otherwise I can't see why a startup would want a PM, unless they also have a "community manager" and believe in all these fluff roles because I guess who cares, they have the funding.

I'm a product manager for a 16 person team. I define the requirements for our products (http://www.staffsquared.com, http://www.fundipedia.com), check to ensure they're produced to the highest quality holding our developers and testers to account, and ensure that our product dev is aligned with our sales and marketing efforts.

I feel your experience of the PMs is specific to that of a billion dollar company with more resources and A star employees than most companies could ever dream of. In smaller companies that enjoy revenue in the millions per annum, I can assure you that a good PM is a fundamental contributor to success.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, you can't write off all PMs. It's all about context, and perhaps in your world PMs are garbage, but in smaller teams they're absolutely essential.

It sounds like you got burnt by being the downsides of being a PM; always having to be somewhat hands-off, too many meetings etc. I would hazard a bet that as lead designer a lot of what you're doing is still PM work; setting the direction, pushing for what gets done and more importantly deciding what to drop.

I'm an engineer. Having a product manager is liberating. I can focus on engineering. Product and design can focus on product and design.

You've had bad experiences. Mine have been uniformly positive.

Please retitle. https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

"For example, blog posts, email signups, and fundraisers can't be tried out, so they don't count as Show HNs."

Thanks for publishing - great read.

Thanks harry!

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