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Comment by polote | Hacker News Reader

There is clearly a lack of boards/forums/websites dedicated to product managers. But what I miss the more is a website, when we can get valuable insights about best practices.

On HN you can get super useful information about any stack/language/framework by reading the comments, but when you are a PM you have nowhere to get that kind of information

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The challenge in building such a community is that PM is a highly sought after job in the tech sector, so any forum or website built around PM discussion is inevitably going to turn into something like Medium, which today is a list of poorly written thought pieces by (mostly) amateurs.

Agreed. Good PMs are busy, and busy ones don't have time to just hang out.

Really? Good developers are busy too. And somehow they have time to hang out too. Look all the available knowledge and OpenSource.

This is where spending some years in a big organization can be really helpful. You can find mentors who have managed major products. You learn from them, but at least as importantly, you have their contact info and these are people who answer their email when you have an interesting problem or question for them.

Doesn't have to be corporate. The high end of government has some really stratospheric talent executing high cost, high stakes projects.

While I agree that good PMs are busy, I'd argue that the bigger problem is that busy PMs aren't incentivized to share their knowledge.

I've been doing my best to try to share my knowledge as a product manager (disclaimer, I write for Product Manager HQ), but that's been a challenge - it takes anywhere from 8-20 hours for me to pull together a thoughtful article, especially because I'm keenly aware of the fact that there's an overwhelming number of low-quality product management articles. I've been lucky to have time on weekends to write, and I know that's not a luxury that every product manager has.

Many of my peers and colleagues are hesitant to jump into writing, specifically because they aren't incentivized to do so. (I'm incentivized by my personal mission "to make other people's lives happier, easier, and better", but personal missions can only incentivize a single person...)

Hackathons are a great way for engineers to share their abilities with others outside of their day-to-day work. I wonder whether there are similar outlets for PMs - maybe some sort of open-mic for best practices, or a company-sponsored "blog day" where every PM sits down for the day and pulls together learnings?

Those who can, do.

That's an interesting point. I'd be really interested in some advice on how to prevent it. Currently with our project Hot Tips form PMs for PMs https://www.jamlondon.io/tips/ we do manual curation (people submit text, or I reach out to specific experts) and then it goes through approval/editing process. It'd be cool to be able to automate it though.

Why doesn't roadmap.com fit the bill?

Has anyone noticed how few "Who's Hiring?" posts are looking for PMs. In an avg month with nearly 1000 comments, I see maybe 10-15 instances of the word "Product Manager"

I believe companies have more software engineers than PMs which invariably means there will be more software engineering vacancies than PM vacancies

I also think the attrition rate for PMs are much much lower than that of Developers.

Yeah, I don't think PMs can really burn out / grow to hate your job as easily as developers do (unless you just have low performance). Also their skills don't transfer as easily. I see people with the title of "PM" (not product though) I work with making more than me who just click through the data visualizations/backend I made and turn that into reports to management... why would anybody give up that job when 1) they are making a lot of money doing something low-stress 2) those skills don't transfer at all.

It's also just a case where lots more people are qualified for this kind of job so it's not as hard to fill a position when the need arrises.

>>>> It's also just a case where lots more people are qualified for this kind of job so it's not as hard to fill a position when the need arrises.>>>>

Interesting. I think it's the opposite. Because PM culture differs from company to company, I feel like companies interview for PMs with a bias for how they expect their PMs to behave. This would be unlike Developers where companies are looking for folks proficient in specific languages.

I've had friends who interviewed with companies for PM positions and the focus was on their doing great UI mockups. The interviewer was looking for good UIs. Unfortunately, these folks were coming from places where the UI mockup they did was just basic placement of elements to communicate the elements they expected their solutions to use. A seperate design team would later turn their mockups into beautiful UIs

That's fair, I do acknowledge that the PM role varies greatly between companies (and often within companies). For example at my company PMs would never make a UI mockup, they would basically be the bridge between designers, management, customers, and engineers when it comes to UI. But if you aren't requiring your PMs to be technical, I mean the sheer amount of people qualified to do that job (even with stipulations such as "knows design") is a lot greater than the set of people who are qualified engineers.

But I also think it's ignorant to say that companies just want folks proficient in specific languages. That might be true for people without much experience but in most cases beyond that (which pay well) people are looking for deep technical understanding of a specific technology (e.g. deep learning) or a specific problem (e.g. scaling large web services).

>>>> But I also think it's ignorant to say that companies just want folks proficient in specific languages. >>>.

Fair Point. For experienced hires, companies want technical knowledge of a technology/domain

>>>> But if you aren't requiring your PMs to be technical, I mean the sheer amount of people qualified to do that job (even with stipulations such as "knows design")>>>

Well, for experienced hires too, domain specific knowledge is also relevant for PMs.

In full agreement. The expectations of a product manager from one company to the next are wildly different. Far different than any other role that I can think of in fact.

Because I see this sentiment (PMs have easy jobs and don't really do anything) a lot on HN, I want to offer an anecdotal counterpoint: I am a PM in San Francisco and most of the PMs I know personally work extremely hard and add a good deal of value to their companies. I realize that as a PM I am biased towards thinking I provide value/work hard, but I can safely say I have never heard of anyone working in a PM role as easy/useless as the one you describe.

As a small team's CTO doing both product management and engineering, I'd say product management is the more difficult role. Might be because I'm not as experienced, but despite having a natural aptitude for it and even after having gone through training and spent a lot of time doing it, I find the job damn hard. You're the broker for a lot of unstructured information and have to fend off all kinds of disruptive influences to land even close to where you're trying to go. I have immense respect for product leaders at innovative organizations.

I don't think all PMs have easy jobs or are useless, and I even know PMs who I think have kind of easy/unimportant jobs (not that I would ever tell them that about their job) who still take a lot of pride in their work and do work hard anyway. But I do think there are lots of PMs out there who essentially fill the role of "business analyst" who end up doing low-skill things that fall outside of easily-defined role-buckets. That's not the employee's fault so much as the organization's.

That sentiment comes from the culture of shitting on everyone other than managers, when anyone is capable of working hard or not.

Seconding this. It's also worth noting that the salary ceiling for PMs is often higher than for developers.

(Disclaimer - I'm a writer at Product Manager HQ, so my perspective is biased!)

I've seen that boards/forums and websites/blogs are distinct categories of resources.

I haven't found a board/forum that really helped me to grow as a product manager yet. My hypothesis is that because there are so many different kinds of product managers, it's difficult to hit any kind of critical mass of invested users who can all answer each other's questions. Even a forum with thousands of PM's may not succeed, because there are so many kinds of product managers (B2B vs B2C, web vs mobile, API vs UI, internal vs external, etc.)

That said, there are Slack communities that are a bit more lively than boards/forums, but even then the user ratios are usually heavily skewed towards newer PMs rather than more tenured PMs.

I strongly believe there are great websites/blogs, however. Two of my favorites (again, bias warning):

1) Product Manager HQ (https://www.productmanagerhq.com/) - generally relevant content for aspiring PMs, new PMs, and experienced PMs. Not as much content for Heads of Product, unfortunately.

2) Black Box of Product Management (https://blackboxofpm.com/) - solid resource for directors of product and higher.

Too true brother. Lots of fluffy thinkpieces that are really marketing or recruiting but very little substantive discussion about how to indentify and prioritize what’s important.

Out of genuine curiosity - which topics or questions would be most valuable to you?

I've written 50+ articles on Product Manager HQ, and the feedback I've heard from my readers thus far is that each one has been uniquely insightful, covering topics that they haven't yet seen discussed by other blogs.

I'm doing my best to close knowledge gaps - would love to hear what's on your mind!

A couple of sites that have been useful to me, in no particular order (not affiliated w/ any):

- productmanagerhq.com - productschool.com - mindtheproduct.com - roadmap.com - departmentofproduct.com

productmanagerhq.com has been a let down for me. Its mostly people sharing articles and tool recommendations. No real or deep discussion. No one points flaws in others thinking/products. I was very disappointed with the community.

That said, the article recommendation in weekly newsletter are good .

I find that's 99% of professional communities. Even the comments here.

Cargo culting gets you way further in most careers than making good decisions. Unless you're high enough up in your company to seriously shape it's future, it's usually +EV to just follow the herd and to be seen doing it, loudly, and often. Hence all the shitty Medium articles about how great every single tool/ideology/framework/technique is.

Thanks for the mention of ProductSchool - we also have a whole bunch of other free resources / communities for PMs at: https://www.productschool.com/free-resources/

Another resource - https://www.forproductmanagers.com/

This seems not to have been updated since July 2018, do you know what happened there?

Agreed. Have you checked out BestPracticer? I've found it useful and they have a PM section too:

https://bestpracticer.com/topic/product-management-151996004...

Sounds like a good reason to release an HN clone for PMs - or use the r/ProductManagement or r/prodmgmt forums on Reddit in a more consistent manner. I'm all for sharing best practices too - but they're locked in my Google Keep without real sharing capability. SMH.

I can spin a clone up tonight if there is enough interest, cause it's something I think would be valuable. That said, we tried this before specifically for longer form hacker news discussions [1] and it died in less than a year.

Not sure how to guage interest without seeming spammy, people can email me or just upvote this comment I suppose.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17091262

[2] https://hackerforums.co/

What would a potential url be? Suspect it would be useful to keep the ycombinator “brand”.

So maybe a sub-site like “pm.ycombinator.com”? Mentioning it here to see what others think...

Edit: Another thought: what if there was a way to “set” an option which would “filter” ycombinator depending I your background interest? When submitting you “tag” of relevant to an area (such as pm, software dev, testing, etc). If you set your interest levels at the top, it will automatically prioritize items based on interest, but allow general interest items to remain on top. (Also avoids issue of second website to visit)

I wouldn’t do it until we had a way of enforcing the no-fluff rule - even more so than generic up/down voting. I wish there was an ArXiV for this type of knowledge.

I think the arXiv idea has a lot of merit!

The key challenge there is that while scientists are expected to produce papers and to review papers, product managers are not expected to do so.

We're expected to manage our products (which makes lots of sense), but that leaves us little time to curate a neutral and high-quality repository of product management knowledge.

While I've done my best to share my knowledge in my spare time (I've published 50+ articles at Product Manager HQ), I strongly believe there's a systemic challenge at play here.

Many of my colleagues are insanely good at what they do, yet they haven't written any articles on product management because that behavior isn't incentivized.

Might not be what you’re looking for but I’ve found the SVPG blog a good resource for reading: https://svpg.com/

Though I think you’re possibly looking for discussions rather than lectures?

It's already been mentioned by a few others, but just calling out Roadmap.com again. I actually help manage the community. So, if you have any feedback or things you'd like to see improved, send it my way. I'm always trying to make the site more functional and encourage meaningful conversations.

Also, as a side note, we put up a monthly jobs thread on the 1st of each month (and it's pinned as the first question on the homepage). I just put up the February one this morning.

Wow, how have I never come across this site. What's your current strategy to encourage more meaningful conversations? I see in some threads you yourself add the first answer, I imagine to set the tone which I think is a good strategy.

What's the current main problem? Not enough answers, or lack of "quality" answers? How do you quantify/measure quality interaction?

Sorry for this inquisitive interview, it's just a very interesting topic. I'd like to automate my own processes, and haven't spoken to anyone managing a reddit-style forum before (apart form one guy who is creating one, but that's a dev more than a community person ^_^)

I was researching this recently (why, I'll say in a sec), found a couple of interesting clack channels of sites people mentioned here: producthq, women in product, product coalition, product school, etc..

A lot of discussions are unstructured or hard to keep track of. I mean, it's slack, not a forum.

What I'm helping create with the wonderful team at JAM London is a curated collection of 'Hot Tips' with short practical and no-nonsense answers form PMs for PMs. It's picking up interest, looks like your question hit the nail on the head! :D https://www.jamlondon.io/tips/

Following John Cutler, Marty Cagan and Teresa Torres helps

I know of a sub (https://www.reddit.com/r/ProductManagement/), but it doesn't seem to be kept up to date very well.

My partner is struggling with this very thing at her work, I'm curious: what are go-to resources for PMs in terms of professional development?

Working with more senior PMs is the only working solution I have found.

Product Management is a very complex role...there is no straight forward learning path today other than doing the job ,building shit and strong mentor ship!

It's also very different from company to company. Some companies will refuse to hire non-technical PMs. In other companies you will find PMs who do not know basic SQL. It's strange.

I couldn't agree more. I had the PM title twice before I worked with some senior PMs at a very successful Fortune 50. What a difference experience makes. I cringe when I think about how incompetent I was in my first two PM roles.

Ditto. My first three stints (albeit with zero help from peers or mentors) were terrible. It seems like you need a couple of epic screwups under your belt before the patterns start to present themselves.

Would you be open to chatting to me as a mentor?

Totally agree. I've taken a number of juniors on over the years where I have spotted raw talent. I would say 50% of them are now killing it versus more experienced (and expensive) external hires. 20% are doing just fine. And 30% just couldn't make it work, at least in our organisation.

It's a tough, complicated and at times lonely role but I wouldn't do anything else... working for someone else at least.

Part of the challenge here is that the product manager role itself isn't well-defined.

My favorite analogy here is the one about cancer - cancer isn't one disease, it's thousands of diseases that all look the same on the surface, but are really different when you dive in. A cure for skin cancer doesn't really help get you closer to a cure for lung cancer, as an example.

Specifically for your partner - what kind of product management is she doing? B2B or B2C? Customer-facing products or internal products? Web or mobile?

The more specificity you have, the more likely you'll be able to find more relevant professional development resources for her particular flavor of product management.

That being said - once a PM hits a particular threshold of experience and self-awareness, they can generally come up with their own professional development track, though it always helps to have a mentor.

Gibson Biddle has some great articles and resources for PMs to develop their careers. http://www.gibsonbiddle.com/

there was a spinoff professional networking/mentoring group whose name is escaping me at the moment, but she can find such resources via women in product: https://www.womenpm.org

yc’s ffc ( https://blog.ycombinator.com/?s=ffc ) is also useful for the more entrepreurially minded.

Thank you for these!!

Are you looking for domain or technology specific project management (PM) information, or referencing best practices for PMs in general? E.g., is https://pm.stackexchange.com/ what you are looking for or more developer and technology-centric planning techniques?

Project manager is not the same role as product manager

It’s because the PM role is largely bullshit.

What experiences have you had which lead you to think that?

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