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>very likely your technical people are smarter than your product people

Intelligence is multifaceted. That business listens to product and not to engineers could be seen as a type of social intelligence of which engineers are notoriously unskilled.

Regardless, framing any portion of your organization as "smarter than" (implicitly "better than") isn't going to help in terms of fostering collaboration.

Also a lot of PMs are former engineers. One could argue a person capable of doing both at a high level is "smarter" than a person who cannot. Certainly they would have a unique perspective compared to people who have only been on one side or the other.

But like you said, intelligence is multifaceted, and comparing people's intelligence is pointless and divisive.

PM is not product, when they get separated from technical in companies, they're literally product, as a team.

But more importantly, most of the time what happens is these people have 2, maybe 3 years of experience. They've done enough to be able to roughly understand technology, and that experience helps them communicate with the technical side, but in no way shape or form does that mean they would come anywhere close to that 20 year old vet on the development team.

But the flip side isn't true. In companies without that strong delineation between them, it's the 20 year old vet who would be doing what product is doing.

Companies who do this are too compartmentalized and they become extremely slow as a result. It's all in an effort to keep technical from having an outsized influence.

I have never understood why companies consistently hire people right out of college (often with random degrees unrelated to anything relevant) to tell a team of engineers with 10-20 years of experience what (and often how) to build.

Back when I was new, engineers worked directly with subject matter experts and the occasional business analyst. Now we’ve mostly replaced SMEs with product, and I don’t think it’s working out.

> Back when I was new, engineers worked directly with subject matter experts and the occasional business analyst. Now we’ve mostly replaced SMEs with product, and I don’t think it’s working out.

Exactly this.

Not only that, but when it works the way you're describing, it's often a 2-way conversation. The developer strives to understand the goals, then starts making suggestions to determine if the business is ok with shortcomings that would make it a lot cheaper and faster, but would fulfill those goals. They'll also dig into what the business wants in the future so when the implementation starts they can take that into account.

Instead we get product who wants to own all of that and then throw things up into a jira ticket and have it magically be great. There's no value add there.

Yes it is multi faceted. But in this industry one of those facets is worth more.

I am an engineer by trade, but I would argue product is more important than engineering. WHAT you work on is ultimately more important than HOW it is achieved from my experience. Yes, bad engineering will ruin a product, but it is all moot if you are not working on the right thing. So many companies I have worked with are working on the wrong thing. Another way to put it is, a company with a great product that has bad engineering will outperform a company that has great engineering but a bad product. Product/market fit rules all. Once I understood this I was able to work with the product team better.

^ and this attitude is _exactly_ why so many companies can't get anything done and why I explicitly pointed out that software developers tend to be smarter than your product people.

So lets be very clear on what I was saying.

software developers can do the job of product, product cannot do the job of software developers

It kills me how many people seem to think the doers are the least important part of it. Gamedev gets this right with the insistence that the idea guy is worthless.

I work as a software architect and I see this all the time.

There are several things you might not see. Folks who have done both jobs will say this.

It's not a job, it's a role, one that senior developers take on all the time.

It gets turned into a job and the result is business people constantly bitching about why everything is slow and what DOES get done is never what they wanted.

The phone game is real.

It's a job of many roles and it's a crazy difficult job to do well at. I'd never do it again. Engineering feels like a cake walk in comparison.

The reason you found it so hard is because you weren't doing the implementation, which is why software developers should be taking on that role.

At that point you're a glorified translator hoping that both sides are understanding each other perfectly. And what's worse is they both speak English!

Translating between who? I don't think we share the same experiences with companies, roles etc, so we might be talking past each other. Product is a pretty ill-defined role.

between business needs and how it gets implemented.

Companies that do this took 3 roles and smashed them into 1.

- marketing fit - business analyst (aka domain experts) - technical implementation

The reason you see people talking about how hard it is for product is because product gets to interface with the business and has an understanding of the problems and the proposed solutions. They try to tell technical to implement with no real understanding of both, due the reality of the phone game it's never implemented as they want, and they get frustrated.

The solution is to stop trying to make technical the tech equivalent of ditch diggers.

Yes, if you want a ditch dug it's relatively easy to communicate that to someone. Software aint ditches.

So while product couldn't begin to start implementing themselves, technical can absolutely be having those conversations with business.

I can see what you are saying if one is the environment you describe.

I've never worked somewhere where eng was treated like ditch diggers. But I've also never worked anywhere where this "business analyst" actually existed. If you build products for many customers there is no such person, because different customers need slightly different things and you have to pick a position v competitors.

Maybe try changing environments? Not everywhere works as you describe.

Then youve never done any real engineering lol. People who say this tend to work in less technical types of "software development"

Most people who have done real engineering and real product jobs will tell you PM is a harder job to do well.

There is more pressure, less control, more uncertainty, more people to keep happy, more ambiguity. And the number of context switches is high. One has to be highly organized too. Crazy difficult to do well. Very easy to do poorly.

It is a lot easier to be a bad PM than an engineer, I'll grant you that. And most PMs aren't great.

What you mean is it's extremely difficult not to produce shit software with a setup like this, even though paradoxically the theory is that this should produce higher quality software.

The reason for this is something called tacit knowledge. The only way for a developer to be successful is if they have the same level of understanding that product does. Since they don't, product needs to be the one implementing. Since neither happens, you get shit software.

The solution is either product starts implementing or software developers stop being treated as line workers.

product used to be three roles that worked together. software dev, business analyst, and marketing. And depending on the size of the company, business analyst and marketing often means working directly with business because that's who collaborates between those two.

There is no value-add in product, the theory has proven out to be untrue.

Give it another 10-20 years and we'll be reading articles about how the "smart" companies are doing away with product and giving it back to the other roles and asking them to do something crazy like talk to each other.

"working with business" suggests we must be talking about different situations.

I'm talking about a company building software products they sell, eg an enterprise software product like salesforce, google cloud, aws, splunk etc. Not internal software or software built for a specific client.

It's all the same, someone has a need and you give them a solution.

That need is either driven by business wanting to improve the software or by technical wanting to improve the software. product doesn't belong in there.

product will never identify that a technical change will enable new things, for example. The ones who can do that aren't allowed in the conversation.

We are talking about quite different environments.

Trying to simultaneously satisfy many customers in a market where there are multiple options, different ways to slice and dice the customer segments, different dimensions on which to optimize a product, different ways to reach customers, different systems to integrate with, it's just a whole different ballgame to building a specific solution for a specific customer.

And at somewhere like google for example, most of the PMs are former engineers and can see technical changes enabling new things. On top of that, at somewhere like Google engineers do meet with customers, frequently. There isn't some dividing line like you describe because all the business units are run by PMs or engineers. They are "business" in your terms.

It is what it is. Your observations and suggestions may well be true and sensible in the environment you are operating in.

You keep saying PM.

Yes. At most silicon valley tech companies PM = Product Manager.

Different environments.

You can have a PM without a product team, they are not the same thing.

Yep, you can structure the roles however you like. I'd guess every plausible combination has been tried.

In my world engineers are first class citizens who have real input to the product decisions and meet customers, the PMs are usually technically capable, the PM job is too big to be done part time and hence isn't. It is what it is, and doesn't seem to be close to how things work in your world. But in my world, the product job is more complex than "someone has a need and you give them a solution". For internal development or consulting, that's probably right.

Regardless, the job is still extremely difficult to do well. Anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't really done the job, at least not outside of the simpler world of consulting/internal software where it's best described as "requirements engineering".

Yeah product managers have a very high opinion of themselves lol. While a handful might be really valuable most are worse than worthless

Yeah I mean I work at a place that thankfully has no "product" team. That was a valuable thing at a certain place but it's been replicated needlessly and most product managers are glorified project managers with no power or responsibility.

Does your company sell software products/services? Or you are building internal software/consulting?

> Intelligence is multifaceted. That business listens to product and not to engineers could be seen as a type of social intelligence of which engineers are notoriously unskilled.

To some extent that's true. I'm sure that product folks tend to have higher verbal intelligence (on average). But all forms of intelligence are highly correlated with each other, and engineers are likely higher overall. Many (though not all) of the engineers I know are quite articulate, even when English isn't their first language.

Much of the difference in "social intelligence" might just come down to being more outgoing and assertive, rather than an actual difference in ability.

> Regardless, framing any portion of your organization as "smarter than" (implicitly "better than") isn't going to help in terms of fostering collaboration.

I agree that the other poster's framing was hostile, but I am sympathetic to their frustration. I think it is helpful to remind product and business leaders that your engineers can be great allies in solving hard business problems.

It's not hostile, just a simple statement of fact.

These product teams aren't interested in collaboration, that's part of the point. A strong software developer can do products job better than they themselves can do it, but they get treated like code monkeys.

> putting a racist and a black man in a room

Suggestion: Avoid prickly metaphors. Especially ones that imply reader is situated in a particular country?

Reason: Everyone can be racist. In a place with only black men, is nobody a racist?

Disclaimer: White guy on an Island. Sorry for off-topic content, I try not to make it a habit. I am generally against PC bullshit.

Did you understand the point?

Then communication happened, and oddly enough, communicating succinctly was more important than listing out all possible combinations in an effort for perfection.

Your tone comes across to me as “snarky” https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Your comment completely ignores my point! My point is that I want conversations on this site to be worthwhile, and divisive thinking tends to destroy that. Your example “black man” is unnecessary and creates a divisive context. I think you make the same category of error in your implied definitions of “engineer” and “intelligence”. If you might spend some time to read through the comment tree below your GP comment, and try and understand why various people are reacting, I think that would help you and the HN community. Aside: Yes, I did understand “the point” which was written about in the article. Disclaimer: I have no HN superpowers.

Edit: What outcome do you want for yourself by commenting here? For me, I want to read insightful comments, and I want to practice my thinking by challenging myself to think about topics that others know more about.

your post was unnecessary, delete it and move on.

>very likely your technical people are smarter than your product people

I'm guessing you work in the technical side of things?

> The thing to understand is that very likely your technical people are smarter than your product people.

Weird. I was an engineer for about 13 years, and I was good at it by the accounts of others. I’ve now been a PM for 6 years and most of the engineers I looked up to along the way have either become PMs, EMs, or Architects. All of us are well above average IQ. We didn’t lose any IQ points by changing job roles.

I would suggest that if the basis of your world view is that other people are less intelligent than you due to their job role that you may wish to rethink it. You are placing way too much emphasis on the wrong thing and prejudging your (current and future) work colleagues based on an inaccurate stereotype.

And I would suggest that the wording of "very likely" implies statistics.

The people that need to understand this are the product people, not the developers, who are the ones treated as if they cannot understand.

theres a lot of orgs where product people will be onshore and the technies offshore, so the model and barrier kind of makes sense (for this operating model), and typically the Product people will be the more expensive/smarter/critical resource in this case.

In my personal experience, that model has rarely led to a good product, good technical implementation, or even good development velocity.

In this setup you need onshore to manage that offshore team or you're just asking for pain.

The key to this is to only hire "product" people who grew out of either Design or Engineering, Anyone who started as "product" is a wanna be general who provides minimal value.

My usual first question to any product candidate is do you find yourself coming from a Design, UX, or Engineering background?

I’ve had luck hiring people with “dev bootcamp” level experience who didn’t excel as an engineer post-bootcamp, but know enough technical jargon to communicate, collaborate, and understand engineers.

Often these are people who became bored with day to day coding having more interest in the business side of the company

People with relevant industry experience, even if non-technical, are also good candidates for product roles.