Hacker News Reader

Comment by rrrrrrrrrrrryan | Hacker News Reader

This might make sense for a company with one product, but for a larger company with many products, there's a lot of benefit in having one person per product who understands their product deeply, and can put on any of these hats when required to make the product better.

View on HN

Seems like you’d have a lot of overlap if what the PM is doing are the activities I listed, and you also employ the people I listed.

Also, what engineer doesn’t understand the product deeply from both a technical and business perspective? Maybe a contract dev, or a new hire.

It’s about responsibility, the PM is responsible for the success of a product. To achieve this he collaborates with all the parties you mention, but in the end the PM has the responsibility. Key in this is bringing together knowledge of the market, the competitors, the customer problems, the value of a solution to these customers, determining a roadmap that will lead towards a successful product, coordinate launch, service, support, and continuous monitoring of the state of the product (does it have the right features, what is the competition doing, what does sales need to effectively sell the product, etc).

Reforge provides good training for product managers. This article provides a good overview of a role of a PM: https://www.reforge.com/previews/product/what-does-a-product...

Having one product owner is fine. The problem is that it should be a role someone moves into from one of the disciplines involved. Design, engineering, domain expert etc…

Now we have Product Manager orgs with Associate PMs, junior PMs, senior PMs, group PMs etc…

A junior PM almost by definition can’t be a product owner. They don’t have the seniority to make decisions, so what you end up with is a situation where senior PMs are handing down solutions to junior PMs who are coming up with even more detailed solutions to engineers. I’ve seen it time and again.

Product Owner and Product Manager is not the same, especially in a larger organizations. Product Managers usually dont manage sprint backlogs, as its too fine grained. I often see sprint backlog that contain 20+ stories that add up to 1 customer facing capability/feature.

I’m not talking about “product owner” as it’s practiced in shitty scrum orgs.

I mean product owner as in the person responsible for the product.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com