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Comment by ngrilly | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like bad product management as much as bad engineering. I mean, the outcome — a bloated product — is bad for everyone: the users in the first place, the engineers building the product, but also the PM who can't conceivably be proud of shipping a bad product.

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In my experience PMs are not rewarded for good product, but rather a mix of shortsighted metrics and whatever their VP/senior person has on their personal agenda. At big companies, employees are often not even using their own products. The corporate ladder is all that matters.

Obviously that’s not unique to the PM role, but seemingly more prevalent. I think it’s an effect of the rootless roaming you get when you spread people thin over large areas, and don’t have clear ownership and responsibility – which I think is a prerequisite for (the good kind of) pride.

But overall, yes, it’s definitely a structural issue with the organization at large. Clearly, when it’s gotten as bad as in this case.

>In my experience PMs are not rewarded for good product, but rather a mix of shortsighted metrics and whatever their VP/senior person has on their personal agenda. At big companies, employees are often not even using their own products. The corporate ladder is all that matters.

YES YES YES. It's why I gave up on working as a product manager after nearly a decade. It's turned into KPI Management and everyone suffers, especially if you care about delivering good product

What career did you transition to?

My background is natural sciences, so I took a paycut to go back into an academic lab and rekindle my bench chops. Been really fun so far and my hope is to continue working in the field as a lab manager or researcher in the private sector. Won't pay as high as a software PM, but a lot more satisfying and healthy

I very much agree and I've seen that a lot in large companies. I really like how Bain explains it: "growth creates complexity; complexity kills growth". They talk about in The Founder's Mentality: https://media.bain.com/the-founders-mentality/

I also agree about your point on ownership and responsibility. That's why I like Amazon's principle of Single Threaded Leaders.

"The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody's part-time job" — Dave Limp, CEO, Blue Origin, formerly Amazon

Best product people I've worked with operated alongside QA and support instead of engineering.

Yup. If you're not talking to customers and hearing the problems on the front line you run the risk of solving problems nobody has.

There is a balance though - in some cases you have to roll the dice and strike out in bold new directions. But this needs to be done with eyes wide open and everyone in full acknowledgement that this is an experiment and conversations with users are the next step.

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