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Comment by flappyeagle | Hacker News Reader

The best PMs I’ve worked with were HIGHLY technical, either in the same areas as the developers or in adjacent areas, like product design, or the domain of the product

PM for retail company did long stints in merchandising at Costco

PM for spreadsheet company was a former banking analyst

Most companies hire under qualified generalist PMs who have to learn everything about their market from scratch; it’s very challenging and prone to outright failure.

Hire fewer PMs, and make sure they bring a key skill to the table. Let Microsoft and Google train the juniors.

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Spotify, if you’re reading this, hire someone who listens to podcasts for your podcast feed in app.

I feel Spotify doesn't do anything they don't want to do. Most changes (especially) in the Podcast function are baaaaad. I switched from Podcast Addict to Spotify (already had it for music), and I ended up to stop updating the app, because I dislike more and more every update.

The insult to that is also "no changelog". I hate the generic "we try to make it better, but ain't telling you what". So at this point it's a gamble whether I want to update or not, so I don't.

Also for Spotify, perhaps it's time to allow a pool of 1000 (?) volunteers from each language to help you rewrite titles, names, etc. in the local languages. I'm happy for the latin alphabet, but do make a "local language" field and then let the users see THAT instead of the common if they choose to.

And someone who has ever used (including caring whether it be off, not just on) to work on shuffle and Smart Shuffle.

I spent at least the first half of my career working with non-technical PMs and thought they were useless. I then joined a company where the PM was a former C++ game dev who was on several credits of some of the biggest games of the 2000's. He was an absolute joy to work with. He understood issues that we faced, he warned us of pitfalls to certain approaches, he greased pathways for us in upper management. I consulted with him when I was trying to decide whether to take a PM role.

Sounds good in theory, but what if your company decides to reduce investments in the spreadsheet product and instead transfer the product team into a much faster growing product segment, e.g. SAP integrations?

Then the perfectly qualified PMs start from square one again.

IMHO it's an essential skill for a PM to familiarize him/herself with a new domain in short time. It also offers cross-pollination / the chance to do things different. Imagine Steve Jobs coming from a pure IT background instead of liberal arts / calligraphy -> Apple wouldn't have been so different any more.

> Sounds good in theory, but what if your company decides to reduce investments in the spreadsheet product and instead transfer the product team into a much faster growing product segment, e.g. SAP integrations?

> Then the perfectly qualified PMs start from square one again.

Exactly the same point holds for programmers: what if (say, by becoming acquired) a company has to switch from being a, say, a Deno/Vue.js shop to becoming a Java shop? Exactly.

So the answer is: don't do such radical changes in the product portfolio and way of doing work if you don't want the employees to more or less to start from square one again.

Note: "were HIGHLY technical".

They had the ability to learn technical things once, then they can do it again. (In a short time? Not so easy to find out until after you've hired them, in any case?)

The time constraint matters. A lot.

1000% this

Pffft, they train the juniors? Hahaha, that’s funny.

https://careers.microsoft.com/v2/global/en/students

https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/students/

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