The Age of the Product Manager
slate.com
slate.com
In the case of someone like Mayer or Steve Jobs—who was accused of many of the same flaws—those strengths and weaknesses make for far better results than the executive alternative, whether it’s a corporate hatchet woman like HP’s Carly Fiorina, an overpaid functionary like Citi’s Vikram Pandit, or an unrepentant economy wrecker like Lehman’s Dick Fuld, not to mention undistinguished wheel tillers like Apple’s John Sculley and his current reincarnation, Tim Cook. Whatever Mayer does with Yahoo, she at least has a fighting chance to revive the company, something that could never have been said of her predecessors.
He could easily make the same point without adding the unnecessary negative adjectives: "Overpaid", "Unrepentant", "Undistinguished". For the record, I think Tim Cook is a very distinguished wheel tiller (if by wheel tiller you mean operationals/supply chain expert) and Vikram Pandit earned $1 in total compensation in 2009-2010, only getting paid starting in 2011 when Citi had already been profitable for a year. Before anyone argues the merits of Tim or Vikram, let me emphasize that my point is not on their merits as CEOs but on the way they were described to make a point for Marissa Mayer.
Jobs would not have been as succesful in phase 2 of his career without Tim Cook. Cook is an operations expert and a great people manager. He cleaned up Job's messes--being abusive and a royal jerk, taking credit for other people's ideas and being a terrible listener.
And where would jobs be without Woz's technical wizardy?
Except the days in which they don't.
1) Pandit was paid a $1 salary for 2009 and 2010 2) Pandit not receiving a bonus for nearly 4 years [1]
It's probably better to look at Pandit's pay across his entire tenure as CEO, vs. objecting to a single lump sum payment.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-12/pandit-compensation...
Also, while Tim Cook is not quite the visionary that Steve Jobs is, Apple's supply chain and ability to exert quality and pricing pressure over suppliers is a huge competitive advantage, and arguably one that keeps their profits so far above other hardware manufacturers.
There are plenty of companies with awesome vision that fail because they can't execute the way Apple can.
Compare Steve Jobs attitude with Pandit's, who announced he would "reduce" his salary to $1 in 2009, only after the $25b in govt bail-out. On that same year, he was compensated "just a few million dollars" (as opposed to $38m in 2008), plus $165m for his hedge fund. [1]
Yes, Pandit was overpaid.
Second, if you are going to include Pandit's full compensation, you need to include the millions of Apple shares that Steve Jobs received for his tenure as Chairman of the Board at Apple:
In 2003, The Board awarded Jobs 10M restricted shares of Apple, arguably a much larger compensation than what Pandit received: http://investor.apple.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1104659-07-...
He also received a Gulfstream Jet from the board, valued at something like $40M: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1040-235835.html
Point being: Jobs accepted a new position and would earn money only if he would deliver. Pandit in the other hand would make money regardless what was the outcome, staying on the position he was before. He screwed it up, got bail-out by the government, reduced his salary to $1 as a mea-culpa, then made a bunch of money and left. Is this what a good CEO would do?
To say that Pandit, who became CEO in December 2007, somehow screwed up Citibank, reflects a misunderstanding of the history of the crisis.
The CDO and MBS markets had been in place for a decade, and were already cratering when Pandit was brought on, and in fact he was brought in to replace the previous CEO following "unexpectedly poor Q3 performance."
Pandit took a reduced salary in 2009 following the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers in fall 2008, which eventually led to the creation of TARP funding. His compensation was only brought back after 2 years and 5 consecutive quarters of profitability.
There are very few people in the entire world who can be compared to Steve Jobs in this regard. In America, there is only one such person and he is busy running an electric car company and a space rocket company simultaneously.
So yeah, the fact that Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs v2.0 should not be surprising. He was never meant to be. What matters is that he is exceptional in other ways and Apple has benefited from his talents tremendously.
That said, maybe Cook's dream of a well oiled machine is more limited than Jobs' vision. Or maybe it needs to be expanded to not just be about Apple.
I don't disagree with the rest of what you said, but this is bullshit. Most CEOs are compensated via stock options. So the fact that his salary was $1 doesn't mean anything.
She's been CEO of Yahoo! for 18 months, and I've been compelled to visit the site exactly zero times in her tenure.
No, she's the CEO of a significant corporation.
Incidentally, the CFO of Lehman's at the time of the crash was a woman too, yet it's Dick Fuld who gets mentioned...
Second, in many tech companies, PMs outrank engineers and the commoditization of tech talent hasn't really gone away. It's just that the titular concept of the "executive" is out of style among the rising generation. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
A good engineer can PM his own work, and doesn't need someone else to tell him what color to paint the bike shed.
This highlights exactly how badly she failed at Google. Many Google products are invidiually well-designed. Google makes lots of fantastic things. But the overall product line of Google has always been an incoherent mess, and is only now in the modern era of Plus and Android getting collectively organized.
And since a solid engineer can design a solid product, where does the Product Manager come in? The larger vision. The whole interconnectedness of their entire product line.
And Google sucked at that. Atrociously.
if you have even a small team of say 5 engineers, it makes no sense for each to be their own PM (5 PM's).
i can't imagine what you think a PM does.
I'm not suggesting that anyone in the thread is conflating PM and PMO in this way, but it's a challenge for the profession and I wouldn't be surprised if given posters perspectives reflect different views on what the PM role is actually supposed to be the expert on. I don't think it's their fault. We use a hyper-generic name that is almost indistinguishable in full and acronym'd form. We also tend to write awful job postings, though that's a rant for another thread.
makes it easier to compete against you.
A good product manager, having done their job, has provided the good engineer with enough information about goals, features, requirements, user profiles and so on that the good engineer can run with that information and build something kickass. In many cases, the good engineer has enough information that they can make informed decisions about things that were not covered by the PM, such as what color to paint the bike shed.
The opposite can happen too, of course, when the engineers focus on features that nobody actually wants. I think grandparent's point was that PMs aren't always a good cure for this problem.
in other words...
If the team is wildly dysfunctional, then bad things are going to happen.
About 18 months we were acquired by a larger company which had product management in one business unit but not another. We were allowed to keep our PM structure. 18 months later, guess what units have the highest revenue? And guess what unit bled money?
Granted this is just my experience, and it's from an engineering POV.
Except that PM is about hell of a lot more than PMing the work of an engineer. It is called "Product" management for a reason. Dealing with engineers is just 1 aspect of it.
A good engineer can do lots of things on their own, many of which are a poor use of their time.
Any engineer working on a sufficiently complex project will spend 100% of their time in meetings without a PM. Even if your average engineer is better at PMing than your average PM (a belief that requires some serious hubris), if the engineer is left with no time for building things then zero work gets done.
Well, that's just dysfunctional. If "stakeholders" are that demanding of peoples' time, then they are the problem.
If your culture isn't engineer-driven, you have bigger problems and the number of PMs you have becomes basically irrelevant.
Sure, for 1 or 2 stakeholders. What if there are dozens? Big projects have lots of requirements and lots of people to coordinate. This is not a small task that can just be hand-waved away.
> If your culture isn't engineer-driven..
Engineers are important and there are notable examples of companies being engineer driven, however you are dismissing the vast majority of companies with your statement. Considering a good chunk of startups are CRUD apps on top of a UI framework of some variety, I doubt many tech startups even need to be engineer driven these days.
Really? What is one of these companies, for example?
You can supervise a technical team, do performance reviews, code reviews, mentor junior team members AND go out and talk to customers to build use cases and triage feature requests?
Good luck getting any sleep.