Chefs and Soldiers Make Good Product Managers
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I've worked with two great PM's and a shitload of mediocre to bad ones. Technical competence, organization, willingness to work for a team of engineers, and humility is what it takes.
The military calls it "servant leadership." They teach classes in it.
Ideally, the military has lots of servant leadership but in reality it does not.
Oh, and bless the good PM's, they're worth their weight in gold. The mediocre ones might as well not be there. The bad ones are actively destructive.
I have had an inexperienced CPO ask me to pseudo-code JIRA stories for an engineering team. You can imagine that ask didn't go far...
The same is true of recruiters
One of my main frustrations with non-technical PMs (chefs and soldiers probably apply, but not always) is when they aren't actual experts in the software business, in the business of code. There are Dunning Kruger effects in play.
The usual response is "find the smart people and listen to them" but hopefully everyone on the project is smart, in which case the advice isn't actionable. And the Dunning Kruger effect is a huge deal when trying to find the people that are specifically great at technical strategy.
Another response is to find a more objective way to find the best technical advice, whether through metrics or less specific track records. But building a good software product is complex and time-consuming enough that you get very few data points to work with. Sometimes the negative effects of bad decisions (massive technical debt, intractable legacy systems, retention problems, etc.) are indirect or won't really be felt until at least some of the personnel on the project has moved on.
A specific concern that a non-technical PM will underestimate is tooling. Unsupported dependencies, old language versions, old compilers, mostly broken IDEs, undersized build farms (if they exist), and so on typically happen when the people making strategic decisions can't code, or at least haven't coded lately. It's not always easy to know when to buckle down and fix something like that, but I often see equivalent (organizational-value-wise) feature work getting star treatment.
> Making good decisions quickly isn't the only quality PMs need that military or kitchen experience instills.
How can you make good decision unless you have intimate knowledge of the problem area. And to do that, you have to have come through the ranks.
What would a chef or military personal (depending on what they were doing) know about spinning up extra servers, choosing to go to cloud, or what scope to cut in a mobile app?
The worst project managers I've worked with have been keen on deadlines without understanding what they're asking for. They're more interested in schedules than understanding the details of the project.
The best project managers are ones that either know the domain inside out or are good at getting the best out of people (and that doesn't mean acting like a slave driver). I've never met one that had both, but I can imagine they aren't short of money.
They want the project to progress. Desperately.
From their point of view they're often powerless people surrounded by line workers that don't want to interact with them, yet they're somehow responsible for the success of the project. They're acutely aware that the meetings are often pointless for workers, deep inside, they know that coloring red/yellow/green rectangles on a gantt chart is of little value.
You can use that to your advantage if you make a request and frame it such that they can advance your progress concretely by helping you in some way that isn't possible for you to do alone.
I've repeatedly hammered home that we're understaffed. Those with the money to spend on staff seemingly couldn't care less. Any middle managers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The phrase 'rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic' springs to mind.
Anecdotally - I've worked as a programmer since 2001 and my best (or at least one of the best) managers was a former restauranteur who never worked in software before.
Better left to ops
> choosing to go to cloud
Better left to the CTO/Director
- what problem it solves
- what the trade offs are vs not doing it / other approaches
- when, roughly, it makes sense to do
- what the time / dollar / maintenance costs are
I'm sure there are many more reasons but that's thinking about it for 30 seconds.
what makes a great product manager is the raw product level insights and instincts that very few individuals have about the product itself and the direction the world is actually moving in.
this is basically the conjoined triangles of success kinda BS.
This came at the right time. I'd been reminiscing about my kitchen families across the country all week.
I also normally take my restaurant experience off of my resume but maybe I'll try putting it back in.
Having worked in tech and as a cook, being in an office environment can be draining and torturous and could turn Gordon Ramsey into the worst slacker. This is also due to attributes of the environment, and not the people within it.
If you want the personal attributes described (ability to work under pressure etc) then seek them from people within the corporate world, e.g. people who do field sales, because at least then there's a chance that these skills will remain.
I'm fairly certain the military would be surprised to learn they lack slackers and indecision.
I think what these articles lack is that being a good PM is more about the process vs. what one knows. A good cook, for instance, would generally have intrinsic knowledge about flavors, cuisines, preparation, plating etc. The more the cook knows about these areas the better she is and would command respect. PMing, on the other hand, has very little to do with the domain of the area you are working on. It is more about the process you use to figure out the following - building out a long term strategy for the area you are working on, breaking down the strategy into smaller parts and prioritizing those, working with and convincing your eng, xfn & leadership team that what you have going is the right thing, being very data driven to figure out what is working and doubling down on it, focussing on a market which is large enough but where you are differentiated etc.
I am not saying a cook or military person can't do that but I would be cautious to generalize.
A product manager that manages a team of developers is in a very similar position.
This is despite the fact that given my background I know more commissioned officers than I do enlisted folks. I assume this is simply that to be successful in the military you have had to adapt to a bureaucracy and structure which is radically different from the business world I live in. Certainly the risk/reward calculus is different. I am not trying to imply they are idiots.
How do you get to "being able to lead without authority"? How do you get to "always taking blame while giving credit away"? And so on.
By practicing, and making mistakes along the way.
Something that most corporate policies / deadlines don't accommodate.
Maybe the question companies should ask themselves is, "Why would someone whose qualities make them a good PM want to work for us?"
Good luck with that.
"I hired a chef and military person and they performed well as product managers. Let's see what conclusions I can make..."