Hacker News Reader

Comment by brunoborges | Hacker News Reader

> This makes it critically important that you, the software engineer, understand the purpose and real world usage of your software. Your job isn’t to complete tickets that fulfill a list of asks from your product manager. Your job is to build software that solves users problems.

You actually described the job that Product Managers _should_ be doing: "understand the purpose and real world usage of your software".

View on HN

Everyone in the team should have that.

Obviously at different levels of focus and completeness, but the Product Manager is supposed to be communicating in both directions and they rarely do, they just take the feature list and tick them off.

Telling the customer that they can't have something or it needs to be different and having their trust that you aren't doing it just to cut corners is what good Product Managers do.

As a developer of new things, if you allow someone else to capture this value from you, you become fungible; additionally, for your group, having technology designed to solve problems without grounded but expansive ideas of how much is possible, limits your team's ability to the mundane rather than the customer delighting. Some product folks have internalized the possibilities but some haven't.

Ideally its a mix, a good PM should understand the customer/market more than the developer has time to do, and then they can have conversations with devs about how to most effectively fill needs. In reality, these PMs seem more like unicorns rather than expected table stakes, but hey.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com