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Comment by notjustanymike | Hacker News Reader

Your anger sounds directed at the dysfunction within your organization. In particular if you hate product management then you've clearly ended up in a bad place. A good product manager is a joy, someone who is a partner to the engineering team instead of an antagonist.

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Maybe they're rare, too. I am but one person, but I've yet to work with one that I'd describe as a "joy".

I've spent a lot of my time helping ours grow into a collaborating by walking them through my expectations of a product brief and what we need from our user stories. They're also really good at helping with the release, managing story sign-off and communicating changes with the other teams (customer success, account managers, sales team, etc). A good product manager manages... the product. They also collect all the user feedback, validate feature requests with data, and act as a guard for the rest of their engineering team.

I have, at a truly well-run engineering team. She was fun to bounce ideas off of, and quick to rope in relevant experts, business or techincal. She also understood the value proposition of each feature, and could easily spot if you were wasting cycles on something unimportant.

Probably not coincidentally, this was the only place I've worked where KPIs were truly a useful way of framing our place within the organization.

I have worked with a few. It made my job much easier. I’ve worked with a couple that were neutral to my job, but I’ve yet to work with one I hated

I don't believe this is true. Having any separation between engineering and product is a defect in the organization. I think the best you could argue is that it's a necessary defect, since it is too rare to find someone who can do the engineering and also keep a perspective on the product. I would argue the opposite, hiring engineers who can't make smart product decisions is like dealing with a shortage of bus drivers by splitting up working the steering wheel and working the pedals into separate jobs. There is some kind of rational thinking behind a strategy like that but it is obviously doomed to be a disaster. Hiring PMs is less obviously stupid, but just as inevitably it is a disaster. If you don't agree, I'm afraid you are like someone who has been on fire their entire life, who will calmly explain how being on fire is fine, and really it's a benefit especially on chilly days. If you ever had the chance to not be on fire for 5 minutes you would stop defending it.

I'm a product manager. His post doesn't seem unreasonable.

Product managers are often hired to be a cat's paw for an unsustainable and/or ineffective way of getting technical work done. This is what many businesses want when they hire into product, because this is a more convenient explanation for why things aren't better than any alternative (such as you're doing too much stuff, you're building the wrong things, etc.).

This selects for people with the skill and temperament to thrive in this role. Being a bullshit artist is a great fit. Being a pushover and repeating everything your stakeholders say is easy. Asking difficult questions and being a skeptic is hard and doesn't make you popular.

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