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Comment by cakedoggie | Hacker News Reader

So the biggest problem is slackers? That is why they make great PM's? What a joke.

> 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?

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I couldn't agree more.

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.

The surprising thing about project managers who use the phrase "when-will-it-be-done" far too much is that they're often willing to help you with getting resources and getting help/cooperation "across silos" if you ask them in the right way.

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.

In my opinion, those are PM who are incompetent because they can't pull and affect those people around them to come to an agreement that everyone is ok with. This type of PM (which is everywhere) is afraid of confrontation to their superior and often can't ask the right questions of their peers and ultimately pull the right resources (in or outside companies) to help out the rest of the team to move faster or done things right.

> "They want the project to progress. Desperately."

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.

I would say a incompetent PM wouldn't be able to make their own deadlines but to only comply deadline set by their superior who of course has no intention or knowledge on how the system actually works and the time it takes to accomplish them. A good PM would be able to fight back and make a much better deadline that both engineer, sales, marketing, design and business all would be happy about. In my mind, a great PM pushes tech to meet new business goals and pull business to be aware of technical pitfalls. A great PM is in control of all sides of the project and able to pull them together without being expert in any of the fields.

The article is about product managers. Not project managers.

My mistake.

It doesn't always work that way.

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.

The article hopefully addressed this question... I would say the role of the PM in my opinion is not about taking their time to think forever to take action. They are the ones to put the whole team in a better position to take action while strategizing so they move forward and make better decisions as time goes on. As there is no way you can know everything ahead of time before making 100% correct action. That is impossible.

> know about spinning up extra servers

Better left to ops

> choosing to go to cloud

Better left to the CTO/Director

What do you want the PM to know about spinning up extra servers?

Off the top of my head:

- 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.

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