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Comment by sophrocyne | Hacker News Reader

Understanding the tech sufficiently and effectively rallying the team around the actual business/user justification for work are literally the job of a product manager who owns tech product development.

While they may not be common, actual product managers do exist. There are a lot of incompetent ones, to be sure, but there are also a number of incompetent engineers.

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The problem is promotion culture. Once a product manager has enough experience to understand the business and the tech they get promoted and you have to deal with a newbie.

It’s so nice to deal with experienced product managers and project managers but it’s rare to deal with them.

> The problem is promotion culture. Once a product manager has enough experience to understand the business and the tech they get promoted and you have to deal with a newbie.

Where do all these PMs get promoted to? If it is to a "manager of PMs" role, that sounds as if the company is always launching ever more products, and that promotion to a higher level with more pay while remaining a PM isn't an option.

In my personal experience, most get promoted to management of people and their skills in project management atrophy over time. Some break that pattern and instead move to consulting. Most companies I’ve worked with and for do not have a career path for a competent, highly skilled PM who wants to remain just that and further hone his/her skills. The choices are up (to people management) or out (to consulting).

Sounds like the career path for a PM is even more constrained than that of a typical technical IC. At least the latter have a few "senior", "lead", "architect", and "staff" rungs they can try to climb before being forced to go the management route.

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