Ask HN: Where did all the Product Managers go?

47 pointsby ycskyspeakalmost 11 years ago

The trend towards having no Product Managers in an organization seems to be catching on. Stripe does not have PM folks. Nor does Square to an extent. When hired, the work is split between project management and passing the parcel between various departments of the company - engg/release readiness/sales etc. There was a time when Intuit was the shining star of PM training. Are there good product organizations? It seems like most are sales or engineering driven. And will this field even survive in the future?

20 comments

CoffeeDregsalmost 11 years ago

Comments seems to be confusing Project Management, Product Management and Product Marketing Management. Those specializations don't often exist in small companies, but definitely arise in larger companies.To the folks denigrating Product Management: it's a very difficult job; and some pretty crappy people get into it when they don't like marketing and can't do software development. That doesn't mean that Product Management is worthless...As a developer, when you build a software feature, you have to keep in mind how this little or large feature will affect the system in the future: hack it together now or build it for real. Neither track is inherently good/bad, but bad developers pick a path without understanding the near-, mid- and long-term effects.Having been a good PM [IMO], the real key was the ability to balance product requirements now against their long term affects: spot features we needed to build now to support another in-development feature; prevent features from being built which would hamstring us in the future. I had the good fortune to return to a former employer and see that: investing in a feature had paid off a ton even though the other PMs had opposed building it; my failed request that we not build certain features had, in fact, produced a quagmire in which we discovered a misset-for-years setting which produced a -15% offset in revenue. Anyone can look at a market and say "hey, we need this little Feature X"; the harder part is realizing that the little dropdown required for Feature X is going to fundamentally alter the perception of your product and kill your sales...

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cdjkalmost 11 years ago

Even if there aren't people who have "Product Manager" on their business cards there's going to be someone acting as a product manager.In my possibly overly-simplistic view, PMs should generally focus on what the customer should be able to do, while developers should focus on how it's going to work. Of course, each group needs to be able to understand the position of the other to be useful. I'm worthless as a developer if I have no empathy towards for the customer (i.e. I shouldn't say "we're not going to implement this feature that would be useful to customers because it's too hard"), and PMs are useless if they don't understand the technical constraints of the existing code/infrastructure.I'd say that PMs are less technical than developers, so developers can do the PM work if necessary (and should be thinking about it a little bit even if there are good PMs).Project/Program Managers are different. Their job is more focused on making sure all the moving parts of a "project" are coordinated. When it's a small start up there aren't as many moving parts, so it's not a useful role - but in bigger companies it's useful to have someone coordinate between marketing, legal, finance, customer service, etc. And they can make sure everything happens on time.You run into problems when developers don't care at all about customers, product managers have no sense of what's technically possible or reasonable, and project managers get too hung up on the process and not the final result. Avoid those situations and everyone adds value.

gjmulholalmost 11 years ago

I sense a lot of hostility toward product managers here, and I don't know why. I could understand why, as a developer, someone would not want a bad product manager, but a good one should make a developer's life easier.Developers are the ones who should be coming up with ideas about HOW to do things. Make something more efficient? Dev. Implement an incredible new technical feature? Dev.Product Managers are the ones who talk to the customer and steward non-technical vision. They are the bridge between sales people—who are incentivized to say yes to every customer request—and developers—who in most cases do not have the time to be thinking about what a customer might want, doing customer interviews, etc. Product managers are there to avoid the lukewarm tea problem, to adhere to a coherent version of a product, and to help coordinate the many parties who have an interest in seeing a product succeed but who might have different perspectives on what that means.Some places that have Product Managers (or Product Somethings (editors, gurus, swamis, whatever)): Apple, Google, Dropbox, Box, Evernote, Square (they exist, I know some who fill these roles), Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, Spotify, and many others. These people not only exist but also are a central communication hub if they are doing their jobs right. Today's shining stars of PM are Apple (for hardware), Google, and Facebook. Everyone wants to hire people away from those teams.The thing that bothers me about the other comments on this thread is the attitude of superiority that some people are taking: "if you aren't a dev/engineer/technical person, you aren't worth shit." Sure, in some companies, technical ability is all you need. But in most, particularly anything of reasonable size, you need a variety of people. Developers are not lawyers or finance people. In many cases, developers don't want to interview customers or aren't good at it. Developers are GREAT at developing (at least some are, others are complete clowns who have no ideas what they are doing), they chose to develop, but a company is so much more than development.A great team--across all roles--is what makes a company great, and that includes product managers.

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overgardalmost 11 years ago

So: I don't really know, but I have a theory.Good product managers are really really hard to find. I've had the pleasure of working with a few, but I would say about 90% of them are worthless. The gems are definitely worth having around though.The problem is, since finding good product managers seems so incredibly hard, I think instead of hiring for it and making it an official title, most organizations just evolve someone into the role. The problem is, being able to be a good manager requires a lot more domain knowledge than a lot of people realize, IMO, and so it ends up that often times the best product managers are people that either evolved into it from a design or development standpoint, or a person that had a lot of good domain knowledge in the subject matter that could step in. The commonality of all the product managers I've know that weren't good was that they really lacked domain knowledge, to the point where they were basically trying to tell people what to do even though they were clearly the least informed person in the room.

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tptacekalmost 11 years ago

Think about the roles of a PMM --- customer discovery, pricing/segmentation, roadmap.In a single-product startup, which is what most startups are, the whole company is doing these jobs. Product/market fit might not be established, or might be just months old, so the people doing sales are also doing customer discovery. The management team is agonizing over pricing and isn't ready to delegate it. The CEO might be reading every commit, and the roadmap is obvious.I was a PMM for a couple years, and the role was described by a friend to me as "president of the product". In an organization with multiple products, you can need that role; one person keeping track of every business facet of every product doesn't scale. But you don't delegate roles until you need to. Like Jason Fried recommends (paraphrasing): hire when you've gotten so good at a role that you're tired and can't keep up with it anymore.

jhwhitealmost 11 years ago

It seems some people are lumping Product Managers and Project Managers together.They should be separate roles. And I believe, ideally, if you're in an organization with Product Managers, you shouldn't have Project Managers.You can depending on the circumstance, but if you're a product manager you're more than likely in an agile environment.Project Managers deal with projects, a temporary endeavor with a definite start and definite end to accomplish a goal. Products are ongoing things. Prod Managers should be looking for trends in the future of the market, and putting those features on the backlog of the team that's working on that product.Are Prod and Proj managers going away? I think Proj Managers are. So many bad ones. Prod Managers? I haven't seen that happening actually. It seems more people are moving to Agile and hiring Prod Managers and Scrum Masters.At least in my area.

poolpoolalmost 11 years ago

Just because you don't have a formal role an unspoken org chart will arise and someone will be acting more as a PM than others.when you aren't trying to build a lasting product, and are hoping to get acquired after a few rounds of funding its pretty easy to not have product managers.

pascaloalmost 11 years ago

Well, I for once am hoping they don't all come back to haunt me!I've rarely met a good one. In most agency style environments PMs are responsible for the messes that will have to be picked up by the devs, having promised the world and are unable to backtrack on any of it "because the customer has already agreed to it". I'd rather talk to someone about what they want out of their product and then let them make an informed decision where they can weigh up cost and impact of a certain feature. After all it's their money.

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eldavidoalmost 11 years ago

I think it depends a lot on (1) product complexity and (2) who the customers are.Stripe has the luxury of a product with straightforward requirements (note this says nothing of the technical architecture/complexity of the product, just what it does -- "process credit cards") and they're building for other developers. In a company like this, it seems easier to prioritize based on developers' understanding of the problem.Contrast that to a place like Zen Payroll (went to breakfast with a friend who works there today). ZP has to deal with complex tax issues, understand and prioritize feature requests from a huge array of non- to semi-technical customers, and deal with major PII/infosec compliance stuff. These kinds of problems really necessitate having someone on the team who will be the go-to expert for their domain, that can act as a "customer surrogate" in discussions of what's important, how something will be used, the relevant laws/regulations/etc.So to summarize, I think it's less necessary to have a lot of product managers if you're building a simple product for engineers. The minute you get into complex access controls, security roles, legal/compliance issues, multiple classes of customers, or complex multi-tiered pricing setups, you need a PM to make it all hang together.

phillc73almost 11 years ago

I'm sitting in Austria, twiddling my thumbs after years of Product Management circuses (eBay, BBC). Would much rather now be something, anything, other than a Product Manager.

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pstachioalmost 11 years ago

I work as a product manager and hardware engineer. In my experience the fundamental role of a successful product manager is to understand the users of the product. And this isn't guess work, its based on hundreds of hours of interviews and interactions with users and potential users, its figuring out ways to prototype, test, and refine features before committing to build, its being able to articulate how the product meets and exceeds user needs. It means that when feature prioritization pops up during sprint planning, the product manager can talk authoritatively about what the user wants or needs. And a good product manager will have involved the dev team in some of these user interactions so the devs can empathize with the users as well.This is not a role fulfilled by developers or scrum masters or project managers. If you want to repeatedly make great product, instead of just the lucky guess / shot in the dark that a lot of startups rely on, you need someone whose whole job is deeply understanding the user and making sure the product under development will meet and exceed the user's needs.

tamireissalmost 11 years ago

"A good product manager could be away for 6 months and no one would notice" (or something like that is often said).PRODUCT Managers have one primary responsibility - figure out what to do next.In order to accomplish that, they need to do research, gather feedback, involve stakeholders, identify risks, and understand from development what's actually possible (among other many other things).I hypothesize that too often people think they "know what the users want" and don't need a PM. In reality, they have an opinion on what to do. Good Product folks know that their individual opinion is often wrong and that only through research, testing, and a little bit of luck can they establish what's next.The more PMs can fine tune this expertise and emphasize this as their core value to an organization, the more companies of all sizes will begin to make sure their is a PRODUCT manager on their team.

cnorgatealmost 11 years ago

Call it whatever job title you want, there inevitably needs to be someone steering the boat. You can get rid of 'PMs' but you can't get rid of the need to set strategy / vision, understand the customer problem, identify solutions, collaborate with design and corral the rest of the organization (marketing, sales, support, operations) to bring it all together. If you don't have a PM performing those functions, then a member of the engineering team needs to step up, or perhaps someone from the executive team. But then guess what... that person is doing the things that PMs do, so I guess you might start calling them a PM...? Or a 'Product Editor'... or 'Program Manager'. All just names for something pretty similar.When organizations are small enough, the whole team performs those functions together. As you grow it makes sense to have someone double down and own those responsibilities. Though this doesn't absolve engineers of the need to understand customers and help paint the product vision.Perhaps the better question is 'Where did all the non-technical-purely-business-MBA PMs go?'The answer is that it is likely a disappearing breed. An MBA won't teach you how to build great software or lead technology teams, so it's foolish to believe that someone with such credentials would be a natural fit to come lead a software organization. Good PMs I've worked with can have a conversation about the technology stack as easily as they can debate a marketing strategy. Great PMs these days need to span the entire 'company stack' if that makes sense.Lastly, if you don't know why a given role exists, then it's probably because you haven't worked with someone great in that role. There are a number of roles in tech companies I found less useful until I met someone who had mastered the craft - when I saw them in action, it became clear why the role existed and how they could perform a certain function infinitely better than I.As a last thought, I worked at Intuit a while back and I'm not sure they are a 'shining star' of PM training. They have done a good job of 'marketing' themselves that way, and they are an example of a company that typically has 'less technical' PMs in their organization. This is because Intuit is more of a 'marketing / business' driven organization. This contrasts with Google who is known to favor promoting engineers into the PM role. Neither model is 100% - the ideal is probably somewhere in between.

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Sindromealmost 11 years ago

Personally I think having one person who's responsible for product is essential. Someone needs to find out what features really matter, how to prioritize them, and make important decisions like when to kill features.I work for a very early stage startup. One of the reasons why we are having such a hard time finding product market fit is that there is no one person in charge of product. We all just do what we feel is important and 50% of the time it's useless, gets scrapped, or wasn't thought out well enough.We need someone who eats and shits the product 24/7 and is responsible for making good or bad decisions.

codeinchaosalmost 11 years ago

They key missing ingredient here is "ownerhsip" you can debate all the pros/cons of Product Manager functions and even Project Management functions till the cows come home, but regardless of functional skills / job description, the only key for success in any of these roles in true Product Ownership.and I'm not talking about hiring a PM off the street then bestowing him/her with the "ownership" of a product they've never seen before! True Ownership comes from a self generated interest in the well-being of the product, its customers, the technology empowering it and its sustainability.This does not happen overnight, and is certainly not a skill that can be taught.The most successful PM I've worked with over the years had one thing in common: they actually CARE about the product AND about the users (clients). this generates an internal drive for excellence like no other, in both satisfying business goals, client asks, and technology roadmap, even though those three are almost never on parallel lines.As to the original question, where did they all go? I don't believe the role in it self went away, but rather smart companies nowadays recognize that a set of skills and an Agile/SCRUM/PMP/etc certificate will not make you a "drop in" successful PM, but rather they rely on the internal champions of the products to help shape the story.This means more developers are stepping into the role, and through the right level of support they can/are picking up the business/accounting/client side of managing a technology product.Also, an important part of a Product Manager (Owner) role is relationship management and communicating with people (clients, developers, business owners, sales, marketing, support, design, etc ...).Human interaction is unfortunately another one of those things that cannot be taught! communicating with people is so different from sending status update emails, or adding them to auto notifications from tickets in a feature tracking system.Sadly, most of the PM I've worked with and from what I've seen, the industry actually encourages the automation, over the human interaction. yet another reason why this role is changing and is being redefined.just my 2 cents.

arfliwalmost 11 years ago

Facebook and Google both still have tons of PM's.

jejune06almost 11 years ago

Square has Product Editors.

isxekalmost 11 years ago

Ha. When I saw this on the RSS feed, I thought you meant "where did all the good product managers go?"

Spooky23almost 11 years ago

In big companies these people are often called Enterprise Architects or Solutions Architects nowadays.

seivanalmost 11 years ago

I am glad they are going away. Don't need idea people.

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