Comment by xenadu02 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xenadu02 | Hacker News Reader

As employee #36 I lived through some of these things first hand and definitely agree with them (I think we were over 200 people when I left).

It was painful going through the enterprise focus transition along with a nonsensical reorg imposed by the aforementioned Big Tech VP. One day we had focused platform-specific teams working on satisfying customers, the next we were moved to cross-functional feature teams and focused on enterprise features that (from our perspective) no one ever asked for.

I also felt the sting from mediocre engineering managers. I remember sitting down with Tracy and Ralph at Uptown Bar and giving them both barrels on what I thought of several managers. To their credit those managers weren't working there very long after that conversation.

IIRC Ralph asked if I wanted to move to being a manager and I declined but in hindsight I think that was a mistake - we needed good management in engineering more than we needed my code.

Another thing that hurt us was hiring a bunch of PMs. Most of them were condescending, ignorant, or both... but suddenly they were telling the engineers who had built everything what to do? IIRC we could have cut that department down to two people with no loss.

The leader of this product team was a manager that just didn't seem to be doing his job, only pushing paperwork and giving scatterbrained presentations. I never did find out why he was kept on so long. I think I very cheekily asked Tracy one time which of his relatives worked at Y2K or Sequoia such that he couldn't be fired because it was clear everyone in engineering was fed up with his nonsense. I'm pretty sure at least several top engineers quit due to that guy specifically.

Either way I don't regret my time at PlanGrid. It was a great team and I'm proud of what the team did and what I did.

As an outsider to the tech industry, it seems to me that the Product Manager/Product Owner role seems to be not only the most BS role, but also the most damaging role? Considering that I saw a post a few weeks back, I saw a similar post (I think on HN itself) where PMs were being fired en masse, I wonder if there is any real utility with the product team, or if it's just a holdover from Google doing its thing back in the days that everyone decided to copy.

I wouldn‘t agree with the BS label, as a good PM/PO can really help along.

but with that kind of role, contribution quality is rarely assed correctly, and at the same time, the sandwhich role between contributors, management, and customers, combined with a usually communication-savvy skillset can be extremely dangerous. even worse in impact than a highly visible „bad“ EVP/SVP.

This. I've had micromanager PMs that made my life hell and I've had PMs that advocate for me to others. It's all about hiring the right people and healthy company culture.

You need both good PMs and an organization that is set up to utilize PMs well.

I good PM does great things if they are very busy across teams and don't have time to hassle people about shenanigans and instead talk to users and understand the product deeply. Many places though have too many PMs that never talk to users and pretend like they know what they want.

PMs tend to have a lot of leverage, so a bad one makes a very large negative impact. A good PM is worth their weight in gold though.

I think of them as basically glue. They just help make shit get done. That could be helping co-ordinate between eng and design, doing customer research, managing expectations, etc. Whole range of things that different PMs do.

Of course there is.

If not for the PM, who will speak with the customers, gather, analyze and understand their needs and problems?

There should be a person that drives the product in the right direction based on customer conversations.

In the early stages founder is the product owner.

But as the company grows, the role of the founder/CEO changes. You now build the people, and people build the business.

Engineers or CEOs building features no one asked for is IMHO one of the major reasons lots of tech startups fail.

Awesome idea, cool product, but no one asked for that feature you were building for 2 months. (guilty here myself)

> If not for the PM, who will speak with the customers, gather, analyze and understand their needs and problems?

The engineers? i.e. the people who will actually be fixing those problems?

> Engineers or CEOs building features no one asked for is IMHO one of the major reasons lots of tech startups fail.

So why put another layer (the PM) in between the engineers and the customers? Sounds like an unnecessary game of telephone to me.

Yes, I continually dislike why engineers are so discounted in terms of parsing customer problems... we build the damn things, we also happen to know how to use the mobile apps, web apps, and desktop apps we build. I'm likely heavily biased and bitter at this point, but I've yet to work with a good "product manager" - and I still don't know what a good one would look like or do.

Sounds like you should work for a company that has only engineers and no PMs or middle managers. Maybe someone on HN can suggest a good one?

The same reason when every year a new iPad comes out, you have a thread on Hacker News with engineers complaining they can’t run Kubernetes cluster on it even though it has the technical capability to do it.

Engineers don’t understand iPad’s product positioning, that it’s not built for them and they’re not the target market.

Want to get a portable Docker developer machine?

MacBook Air is cheaper and lighter than a 12.9 iPad + keyboard.

However, given the chance they’d be happy to ram the iPad with never ending list of features.

Companies did that before the iPad and failed, because they couldn’t say no to ideas that sound great and focus on what’s really important.

More often than not, engineers lack the people skills and business experience to know what questions to ask and how to dissect the answers they receive.

The “Mom Test” is a great example of that.

Apple famously manages to do this with no Product Managers in its hardware or core software development organizations.

Open ecosystems foster growth and innovation though. Yes, companies have tried making something hackable and failed but other companies have tried closed eco systems and failed.

There is a reason I have a PineWatch instead of an Apple watch or Fitbit and Wyze cams instead of Nest or Ring.

I want to build an encrypted local mesh network with my iPhone for emergencies, I'll probably just do it on Android and have a few spare phones for family though.

I guess it is a profit incentive vs building the future. Running a Kubernetes cluster on an iPad would be cool, like that poster who leveraged an iPhone for OCR'ing memes. [1]

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34315782

But docker works better on linux… if you want a docker machine a macbook air is not the best choice.

Side issue but the iPad is a bad example. People first complain when it comes to the iPad especially the top of the range is that it is artificially gimped to protect the MacBook sales contrary to what customers actually want.

I can tell you that easily because I am currently as far from an engineering position as you can be and see people all around me who like the iPad form factor but are annoyed that you can’t properly run Office on it.

The bit about most engineer not being able to talk to customers is spot on however.

I think you’re getting bad answers here. It’s not just about talking to customers and understanding what they want, it’s about taking that and matching it against bigger business goals, budgets, and priorities plus making sure you’re not duplicating or messing up things other teams are planning plus prioritizing within all the features all the customers want. If you have time to do all that then why is the company paying you an engineering salary to write code?

If you’re doing all that, the company could be paying you staff engineer or senior manager salaries?

It's not about being able to do all of it -- it's about being able to do it in a sustainable number of hours a week. Otherwise, you just have someone with the programmer title but actually doing PM work, and not doing it as well as someone who is specialized in the role.

The arguments in the thread are that aligning the product as built and architected with the goals of the company is actually engineering work and not PM work.

You still need to aggregate and contextualize these in terms of overall business and product strategy. Yes, engineers can do that too and some percentage of engineers are good at this as well - and being able to understand and formulate product strategy can be an important part of an engineering leader's skill set - but that's not that common and ultimately you need some level of specialization and you can't run an org expecting everyone to be able to do everything.

I've done both Eng and Product and most engineers don't have sufficient understanding or appreciation for the importance of product strategy. It's also important to be able communicate strategy coherently at some scale, especially if execution isn't expected to be completely top-down. At some point, engineers just have too much else to do and you need coordination.

Edit: I'll also add that engineers aren't the only ones doing work - Product Managers are expected to be able to coordinate across functions and get everyone on the same page, not everything is about just providing input to engineers.

You could, and probably should. The challenge is with the fad of scale. Every company wants to be the big guy hence bunch of hiring bunch of initiatives. It is common for people to subscribe to the ritual that a proper team should have some combination of PM, UI designer, UX designer, frontend, backend, devops (which is actually ops), QA, scrum master, customer success, support, data engineer, etc. Like graft different sticks together to call it a tree. OR you could grow a tree organically, naturally. Someone in your team is good at empathizing with customer? Good, do more talking with customer. Good with motivating colleagues? Good, do more motivating. It just doesn't quite fit the narrative of scale

Office Space had a whole bit on this two decades ago: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo

The PM role gets described as the "CEO of <product area>" which I think translates to people thinking the role is ultra high status.

The best PMs I know operate like CEOs in the sense that it's someone's job to scrub the toilets, and until you figure out how to afford/hire someone to do that for you ... you're scrubbing the toilets yourself. Someone has too!

The 0% interest free capital environment distorted the PM role though, especially in land grab cultures. Imagine having enough budget to hire a 4-6 person squad of toilet scrubbers (and golden toilet) so why ever clean it yourself?

So sorry for the crappy metaphor, but that's why I believe PMs are on the chopping block right now. Not because there's something intrinsically not-valuable about the role. From the perspective of Tech Lead / Staff Eng in a Big Tech Co, good PMs created clarity and helped my team(s) execute. The worst PMs created ambiguity, and the worst of the worst pushed ambiguity+responsibility down as far as they could.

I’ve worked with a few good product managers. I always equate PM to project manager which is totally different and typically useless in software development. The most useless BS role is when companies hire for scrum master.

You are thinking of scrum master, who can make up to 50% more than POs/BAs. Let me summarize:

1. "Hey, I am picking up my kid from preschool, so cover (my only 15 minute meeting of the day)". This is a mandatory future present in 80% of scrum masters.

2. Team, good job, I am so proud of what you have accomplished - I, for one, am always looking for the approval of a random person who has little to do with the team.

3. "Well, what do YOU think we should do"? "Thank you for your input! Let's remove those blockers. Go ahead and reach out to whoever the relevant person is!"

4. Key knowledge required: Daily standup, retro, planning meeting run by dev.

Did I miss anything?

“Product Manager” is a double category error - the right title is customer analyst. This clarifies the actual function of the role, and eliminates most of the dysfunction

Yep

Hah - what a vivid recollection.

It's been a while - we should catch up soon :)

let's go Uptown! One of the more colorful bars in the mission for sure :)

Their bathroom is fun

Another former PlanGrid employee here - our office was next door :D

There are dozens of us!

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