Comment by phillipcarter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phillipcarter | Hacker News Reader

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> The product manager behind this cares about having numbers to show their manager and isn't concerned about the potential reputational impact it might have on the company as a whole.

Speaking as an ex-PM at MS, just about every individual contributor PM I've met at MS cares far more about reputational impact than making some little metric go up (even if it's a revenue metric).

I get that it's easy to use the PM discipline as a whipping boy because it's a PM's face that is associated with product changes, but I've rarely seen one at MS actively push for this kind of stuff. In the overwhelming case, they argue with their management structure for a while and get dragged kicking and screaming into a decision that they think is dumb, but they're told to own it anyways.

Typically the decisions of the boneheaded variety are made much higher up the org chart by higher-level middle management in the company who don't use the products they own and are (often) pretty thoroughly unaware of what their users actually care about. These decisions suck really bad too, because they overshadow countless other great decisions made by truly excellent people in similar positions.

Of course, it's entirely possible that everyone involved in something like this thinks it's awesome right up until it gets announced/released. I've just never actually seen that before.

As somebody who has been using Microsoft stuff for years and paid through the nose for it, can you take a guess on why Microsoft is going this shitty path since Windows 8 came out?

I have issues with a LOT of stuff, but ads on the login screen, telemetry that can't be opted out of, privacy invasion, Cortana that is literally malware and the list can go on for days - which people did push for this? The janitors?

Excuse me, but your explanation is just a personal anecdote. Management approved on all this crap and bloatware, you can't realistically cop out that "ohnoes all the PMs at Microsoft I've ever known are more interested in the company's image etc and haven't been actively pushing for this stuff".

I mean, we SEE IT. How tf did all this stuff end up in the OS? Somebody stumbled and landed face first on a keyboard and this crap wrote itself?

Edit: how can upper management ask for this stuff from their underlings if they have no clue about what is happening or what the users want? I also apologise for the harsh tone, but I am so done with Microsoft products I can't help being upset.

As an ex-PM, the idea that PMs are the ones making all the decisions absolutely does not resonate. Fundamentally, of course management in general (not specifically product management) is approving these things and carries the responsibility, but in my experience (not at Microsoft) the involvement of another firm is a clue this originated with a bizdev conversation. That sounds more likely to me than a PM saying "I really want to offer loans through Edge, let me see if I can find a partner to help execute this."

Current MSFT employee... I can say that PMs often wield a lot of power over decision making than most people in the org, esp the customer-facing decisions. And while it may not have been the PM in the lowest-rung of the chain, the parent comment perfectly applies to program managers in general, often in the middle management or higher up, both of which are often disconnected with real world, in spite of their claims to otherwise. PMs at Microsoft have enormous veto power, they cite data (or lack thereof! ;-)), direct customer interaction, conducted user studies, etc. which the dev team is usually lacking in. Of course this is only an anecdotal observation over the last 2 decades or so. Increase in $$$s in revenues is one of the best ways to get promoted, recognized and rewarded at Msft (and not only at MSFT, I suspect that's the case at most publicly traded companies, who only care to drive up the the bottom-line, no matter the means to achieve it, as long as it is (mostly) legal).

> Typically the decisions of the boneheaded variety are made much higher up the org chart by higher-level middle management

And what's that person role? Someone I feel its not a VP of quality insurance who made that decision.

This sounds like typical "roadmap via bizdev" to me. Bizdev strikes a partnership (in this case, with the firm making the loans), and then it gets handed to the poor PM to push it through.

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