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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

The most dysfunctional engineering organizations I have seen are ones where product managers are embedded at the deepest levels of the team and do everything from defining requirements and handling cross team collaboration all the way to planning and running sprints, bug triage and release management.

On the other hand, the effective ones have always had way fewer product managers with a lot more individual authority, who are in charge of the overall product direction but will let the rest of the team execute it to completion.

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Agree 100%.

Product managers are really business managers. Their goal is to ensure the software meets a business need that can help the firm developing it translate the value it delivers into $ by application of a commercial model.

Put another way - they define the WHAT and WHY, the HOW should be managed by their colleagues in Engineering.

You’re describing an analyst position. Product Management is a misnomer, IMO.

The best PMs I knew were amazing analists. They wrote logs quiery processing code themselves to understand the product better instead of asking other engineers to do it. The only problem with them is that they don't stick around, but start their own startups.

I keep ending up in that kind of a role. But since I’m higher paid than project managers I always get forced into doing development instead. So either I have to do my actual job after hours so I can help the company out. Or just do what I’m told and ignore the big picture.

Would be nice to do it in a formal way about taking a massive pay cut

The thing is he wasn’t forced into a role of writing code. He was an APM at Google when Google didn’t have many PMs, and he was in a supporting role of helping teams to be organized and decide on the future of the product when we didn’t know whether some non-technical ideas should be executed upon or not and help with the non-technical part of the execution.

Nowdays I felt just the opposite happening when I worked in Google Ads: PMs getting new feature requests from sales people and pushing down on us with strict timelines, even if we feel that that feature is not the best way to deliver better ads targeting for our customers.

Probably you should just go to a smaller company with less PMs, where the PM/Eng ratio is optimal or too small (or go into higher management)

I've done this and it fail horribly, I'm the product manager as well as the implementor.

The problem is usually I choose solution which is easiest to implement and usually the scope is too tight because I need to also design the lower api and libraries.

I too feel like i've learned through experience that the product manager (whether with that title or just effectively being the one doing it) should never be the same person as the implementer/tech lead. It just doesn't work. And as an implementer/engineer, it ends up being so much less stressful when there is a product owner who you collaborate well with, but who is someone else. And you get a much more succesful product too.

Even though I think I am someone who understands the customer/domain pretty well, and is good at empathizing with the user, you're just too close to the implementation to effectively product manage.

In the domain I work in, I think people are used to the "head implementer" being the effective product manger (although without that title), and it takes some work to try to convince decision-makers, please, let's not do that.

Microsoft does this and IMO is one of the reasons their products are lackluster at times. There are other reasons but this is definitely one of them. The PM role is spread so thin they don’t have enough time to boil down seemingly related pain points or customer rants in to a coherent story. Even with perfect execution the product tends to have a broken UX.

That's a pretty good observation, too often Product owners are acting like project managers, not much vision lots of detail management.

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