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Comment by happymellon | Hacker News Reader

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happymellon·

PMs are not idea people either.

They do not generate worth through ideas and they do not generate worth through implementations.

They solicit other people's ideas, count how many votes each idea gets, and passes them to the grunts.

They are middle management distilled.

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Even if the ideas are not their own, they’re still making a decision about what the product is supposed to do.

You’re going from OP’s: “I’m not an idea person” to “All PMs aren’t idea people”. This is such a fallacy. It just bothers me how easily some people fall into the trap of wrong generalizations.

The role of PM is not a creative one, the purpose is bureaucracy to improve the noise/signal ratio.

My experience was different. I had product managers who tried to come up with new features in a very creative way, instead of just collecting requirements from the customers and passing those to developers.

A lot of people confuse Product Managers with Project Managers. In a typical tech company, the Product Managers are creative roles, come up with ideas, new features, and so on, and ProJect Managers help shepherd these features and projects through the software development process from planning through implementation, testing, and deployment. Totally different roles.

What would you call someone who does both? Like at a startup or smaller team

Both of what?

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