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Comment by tyre | Hacker News Reader

I think the challenge with this is what happens when you’re in a growing product org.

At a certain point it makes sense to have product managers. Maybe for a while you keep optimizing for developer usecases, but that’s no longer your customer (even if they are most of your users.)

Larger revenue deals come from teams with more people and those are the ones that need more manager-focused features or where there manager is the buyer. From a go-to-market standpoint, you might put a ceiling on your revenue if you limit the addressable market to those teams that are still product managed by developers.

Not that that’s bad! Just a thought.

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Our product managers user clubhouse constantly and love it.

Club house has done a great job of organising information into stories, epics, milestones, projects.

All task manager products have some variation on these components but I've found clubhouses organisation of them to be the best.

It allows you to very quickly view the data differently depending on the context: stand up, sprint planning, PM trying to figure what's going on and what should be next.

My gut is that it turns out the way developers want to organise there work is actually a really sensible way of doing it, and so it scales up the management stack well.

Just to clarify, we think a lot about product managers, but when there's a tug-of-war between making life easier for developers vs making life easy for PMs we lean towards the former.

> At a certain point it makes sense to have product managers

I would just hire more engineers who have a good product sense and give them more power. That was Facebook's approach (initially).

if you’re building a product for engineers, that makes sense. your product managers are then former engineers.

if you’re building a product for normies, you want to hire normies as your PMs.

This idea that understanding how to build a product means you do not understand why or how someone would want to use it is baffling to me. Yes, some engineers have no product sense and no taste. But there are plenty that do. As is the case for all non-engineering fields as well.

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