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Comment by llamaLord | Hacker News Reader

As a PM, I believe what you're describing is the torrent of people who used to work as "project managers" and "business analysts" who've transitioned into Product for the higher pay, without appreciating any of the differences between the roles.

IMO, the fundamental role of a PM is to make the decisions nobody else wants to (and own the consequences of them). If my team is making progress and decisions are being made, I get the fuck out of the way.

I jokingly refer to myself as the "designated scapegoat", basically meaning it's my job to tank the risk for situations where everyone is nominally in agreement about something, but nobody wants to be the person to put their hand up and own the decision because of the risk if it backfires.

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When I started my first PM role, I was lucky enough to work for a boss/mentor who had the same mindset. As a dev for most of my career before moving into PM, it made sense to me:

“If things go well, dev team gets the credit. If things go poorly, PM takes the blame”.

This is fundamental to building trust with the dev team and gaining the respect of leadership.

This made it possible to guide the product in directions the dev team wasn’t immediately comfortable with, because they knew it was my ass on the line. And when those decisions led to good outcomes, it further reinforced the trust relationship.

I haven’t countered many PMs who live by this, but it sure makes a big difference.

Damn I wish any PM I had ever worked with had this attitude. Honestly I don’t recognize any of this ownership in the last few companies I’ve worked with. PMs are just people that don’t talk with customers, review a product backlog, and cover their eyes and point at the Feature du jour. I wish more PMs had your ownership approach.

To jump in front of a bullet that no one wants to be struck by? As a PM, I want my eng team to be courageous and stand by their decisions rather than respecting me only once I offer my self in a sacrificial ritual.

Are they technical decisions? Yeah, sure, that's on them.

But a LOT of decisions in reality are ones where there is no clear "organic" owner. In that scenario, assuming nobody else is putting their hand up to own it, that's the PM's responsibility.

Nobody will ever tell you this in interviews, it's never part of the job description, but it is one of the most important parts of being an effective PM.

Hard agree with this take. Also, a good PM should be technical enough to really understand not just how customers use the product but how the product works. you should be able to be the designated person to answer a question from customers when nobody else knows the answer. In my role as a PM, I'm usually the person the buck stops with for Sales, Support, Solutions Engineering, et al. You can't do that if you don't actually know how anything works, which I see way too much with other PMs in this industry.

As a PM, you unlock a lot of value by getting engineers out of a lot of these meetings, by being technically competent enough (for these contexts) to not need them 99% of the time. It isn't even just about the devs' time either. It is about their focus and reducing context switching too.

100% agree. This is the biggest debate I have with other PM's who say "you don't need to be technical"... Total bullshit.

You're expecting to be able to engage with your engineering team around the relative effort and complexities of different technical solutions... You're gonna need to have an understanding of the underlying technical details.

The way I see it, I don't necessarily need to know how to build the thing (as in, all the implementation details). But I absolutely need to know how the thing we're building works, what all the key moving parts are, and how they relate to each other.

Without that, there's no way I can develop any kind of intuition as to what is and isn't possible, which is CRITICAL when managing expections with customers or internal stakeholders.

Mismanagement leads to failure. Failure leads to layoffs.

We’ve hit industry maturity with ever slimming margins but with management still operating like costs don’t mean anything. If management was doing their jobs they would discover the cost of meetings and ultimately the cost of indecision!

PMs shouldn't have to fix organization dysfunction while operating in Hero Mode.

I'm not a PM, but you are exactly the kind of PM I love to work for.

So many PMs are either over bearing or scared to make decisions; or, the worst, that do both, over bearing and micromanaging all the time and then blames the team when their decisions back fire.

If a PM has time to micromanage the engineers, something has gone seriously wrong in that organisation haha

Interesting that you mentioned working “for” a PM. I do believe a healthier relationship is driven by working “with”.

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