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Comment by omarkatzen | Hacker News Reader

Miss. First of all, citing Google as an example in product management is a mistake. Google has, overall, pretty bad product management. Its strength is hard engineering. Being a PM at Google is like having Risk Management at LTCM or Amaranth (hedge funds that blew up) on your resume.

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.

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> A good engineer can PM his own work, and doesn't need someone else to tell him what color to paint the bike shed

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.

Sure, but the process can become wildly unbalanced. If the engineering is enough of a limiting factor that 90% of the planned ideas never happen and the 10% remainder consists entirely of mission-critical features, then a PM doesn't have much value proposition and it makes sense to combine the engineer and PM roles (supplemented with a culture of "why are you doing that" at standups to prevent tunnel-vision).

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.

"If the engineering is enough of a limiting factor that 90% of the planned ideas never happen"

in other words...

If the team is wildly dysfunctional, then bad things are going to happen.

> 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.

I'm on the fence about this. I've worked in an organization with product managers for nearly 8 years now. The good product managers know how to drive the product (and understand the market, something engineers may not be interested in) but allow engineers to do their thing. The not-so-good product managers get caught up in small details (like what color to paint the bike shed) and attempt to tell engineers how to implement features.

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?

In my experience, a good PM says "no" to things. I've worked on projects with a weak/ineffectual PM that suffer badly from "feature creep", because the engineers on the team continually moved to make "minor" changes to improve things that ultimately customers didn't want or need. To me, this is where a PM comes in to set the pace and keeps the engineers on track for specific goals.

Granted this is just my experience, and it's from an engineering POV.

And, a good PM also says "no" or "can it wait" or "ok, if you insist, but here's the downside" to folks on the other side of the line - customers, senior management.

Yes, this. Dealing with the upstream is the part of product management that most engineers severely dislike. Also, dealing cross-functionally with all the parts of a product team that aren't engineering (are marketing up to date on the launch? what's our ops plan?) -- and reaching out across teams to collaborate and build new products. I've worked with some great tech leads who were almost entirely PMs in terms of what they did, but that left them with very little time to actually write code.

> A good engineer can PM his own work,

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.

Any engineer working on a sufficiently complex project will spend 100% of their time in meetings without a PM.

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.

> If "stakeholders" are that demanding of peoples' time

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.

A good engineer can PM his own work

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've spent a lot of time in technology product management (PM) and I still frequently encounter "Product Managers" who are doing entirely project management (PMO). And there's business analysts and other technical product management functions that are centered around requirements and specifications rather than market discovery, product fit and strategy, plan for making actual money, etc.

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.

Well, the PM job is so fluid depending on the product, the team, and what's needed to get it shipped. I've worked with engineering teams that just needed project management from me, although I think PM-style project management may involve more ruthless decision making as it's usually a case of fitting a very large peg into a very small hole.

"A good engineer can PM his own work..."

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 PM his own work, and doesn't need someone else to tell him what color to paint the bike shed."

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.

i fully agree with your last statement and please spread this mindset far and wide. it really should be engineers making all product designs/decisions. from UI and complex business workflow coverage to all the nice roadmap conversations with customers. and all those devs complaining about "distractions" from their coding? all BS, they like spending 90% of their time fiddling with the above.

makes it easier to compete against you.

Most tech companies have parallel career tracks for engineers and product managers with equal "ranks" on both tracks. Good engineers can do some PM work. But in vertical markets where the engineers lack personal experience in that field it's unrealistic to expect them to make good decisions about what customers need. For example, good luck finding an engineer who really understands how physicians use EMRs. That's why you have to bring in specialist PMs.

Exceptional engineers can PM their own work. For everyone else there's product management.

> Second, in many tech companies, PMs outrank engineers

Really? What is one of these companies, for example?

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