Friends say the same thing too. It makes me roll my eyes whenever someone retorts "you just need to hire the /good/ PMs"
Even my worst sales/tech colleagues, I've never had as much conflict and annoyance as with product people
Someone in management decides that "we need to be product led" and appoints a product manager or owner. They then either spend their time micro managing the development process, or making unrealistic goals which don't take into account the development team at all.
I have sometimes seen good product managers - people who are engaged enough with the development process to understand the state of things, and can suggest the right direction to take development work to meet external requirements. The problem seems to be that there's not an effective selection process for them. When an organisation is "product led" that makes the product manager a de-facto team leader (regardless of what people say) which makes it very hard for the developers to hold them accountable. There's limited objective metrics you can hire them against, and the person who does hire them is often their manager - less motivated by development productivity than by the appearance of productivity.
I’m not sure if product managers at small companies and startups act this way.
At the larger companies the people who spend all their time fighting for power seem to be product managers.
It doesn’t make sense at all to me why these people get specifically hired and put into these roles. Because people who want power are defined by the trait of not listening and that is exactly what a Product manager is supposed to be an expert at: Listening.
So you hire people who are guaranteed not to be good at listening and of course you get really bad results.
I think most of these product managers choose these roles because they are more interested in power. Or their managers want power.
Ten years of experience at various startups, and it is absolutely this way.
It was a hybrid role that every org did differently, and it was confusing to everyone and made it hard to separate product focus from execution focus.
Last year they split the roles into Product Manager and Technical Program Manager (TPM), and PM’s had to elect which role/title/path to choose.
This is at least true for the Experiences and Devices and Cloud and AI orgs.
Source: work there now, have been there 6 years.
To me, it always felt like it was supposed to be an intentional "product" role as opposed to "project", but you're right that it basically was a hybrid where they worked on product but also helped manage the project itself.
Product folks who don't have domain experience always seem to fail, no matter how hard they work. Their opinion is not trustworthy on important topics. To compensate for their obvious lack of merit, they HUSTLE. They fall into the trap of crowd-sourcing ideas, insisting on design patterns that make no sense, and micromanaging a project to death with story points. They pathologically avoid any tough decisions (because deep down they know they don't have the skill or knowledge to make them) and prefer to focus on small tractable tickets that they show visible progress. No matter how well they run their processes, their lack of domain experience will almost ensure poor quality.
But I'd say over the past 5 years or so, wherever I go the expectation is that the PM must put their nose in everything and I'd have to gently, if diplomatically explain why that's dumb. I think it's the whole "the PM is the CEO of the product" which is stupid. The CEO is the CEO.
Take a look at most PM job adverts now. The expectations are insane and something only a go-getting type A MBA control-freak type would go for, with the expecting that you play an intimate role in low-level architecture decisions to leading webinars with end-users and everything in-between.
Who wants that? I might as well go start a company.
Terrible blog post BTW. Poorly written and badly developed arguments
And god help you if your product is technical and your PM isn’t technical or knowledgeable enough. Conversations get fun when the PM says something wrong and you’re now trying to correct them “respectfully” in front of customers.
As we all know from agile it's impossible for a customer to know what they want and it's the programmers job to talk to them to figure it out anyway
>> market
As Heynren Grufford said: the market can want a faster horse for longer than you can be where the puck will be
So they focus on what they think they can control.
No, you need to hire good EMs to provide checks and balances. Any system without checks and balances will go off the rails at any moderate scale no matter what you do.