
Product manager responsibilities - sturza
https://www.leaninberlin.de/2019/03/product-manager-responsibilities.html
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mharroun
Speaking from startup perspective.

While there are a hand full of exceptions. IMHO the dedicated role of a
product manager is exceptionally counter productive.

Unless they are a founder they tend to lack technical expertise of capable
enginners and enginnering managers as well as have a disconnect from the core
drivers of what can make the buisness sucessful.

Maybe I have just had bad luck but in my 12 years of experiance with 6+
startups it's either the founders or buisness competent technical leaders who
have driven a company and its products to suceed. "Formal" product managers I
have come to associate with elements that kill startups... things like kingdom
building, playing politics, information withholding, setting timelines and
expectations without any real clue what it really takes.

We need buisness competent enginners, systems to feed feedback from sales and
customer service to product enginner teams and engineering leaders who can
communicate with other departments and understand buisness goals that they
must build towards.

What is not needed a role who does not know sales, customer service, marketing
,or enginnering who puts systems in place to seperated thoes units for their
own personal benafit.

~~~
skewart
At the end of the day, engineers need to know what they should build. Customer
feedback, usage analytics, and all the other signals about what people might
like need to get collected and distilled into actual feature ideas. And those
feature ideas need to get broken down into development projects that can test
the underlying assumptions and hypotheses.

In other words, product management work needs to get done, one way or another.

Saying you don't need product people, you just need engineers who can do
product work, is like saying you don't need engineers, you just need designers
and salespeople who can code.

Sure, you could ask engineers to do all the product management. But then
they'd just be PMs, except with engineering titles.

All that said, it sounds like you've worked with some pretty bad PMs in the
past. And a bad PM can certainly be worse than no PM - kinda like how a bad
engineer can make their entire team less productive.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
This is common-sense, intuitive, and practical advice.

It's also wrong.

The piece you're missing? _The technical definition of the problem changes as
we engage with solving it_

So there's no "collected and distilled". This is not a grocery shopping trip.
Instead there's heavy user interaction, playing, and coming to grips with both
the tech and user and how they live and work together. You can't capture that
in a stack of printouts or Word docs.

There are two problems with project/product management in tech. First, value
discovery is a completely different activity than value delivery optimization,
although they use mostly the same tools and skills. You can't tell from the
outside which is which -- and we train most all of our management skills
around optimization. Second, the intuitive way we humans have of solving
problems, where we break them into pieces, "componentize", then optimize --
it's the wrong way of looking at it. Our natural intuitions lead us astray.
(It's not a manager thing. Tons of great technical folks have taken a shot at
managing and made these same mistakes)

Disclaimer: wrote a book on how this works at the team level. Currently
working on one about the program and product management level.
[https://leanpub.com/info-ops](https://leanpub.com/info-ops)

It took me many years of watching this fail over and over again before it
finally clicked what was going on. The PM _skills_ are desperately needed.
It's the framing of the work that begins to take us down a dark path.

~~~
polote
I dont understand your point,

The comment above says, that to have a good product we need someone that
understands the users. And if we want someone to be good at something he has
to do that most of his time. So we need PM.

I don't think your answer is relevant, also because project management and
product management are complete different disciplines

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Apologies. I did a poor job of explaining myself. I completely agree that they
are different disciplines. Yikes.

I'll try one more time. I guess if this were easy to explain it wouldn't be
done so poorly everywhere.

By looking at the Product Manager's role in terms of componentizing
responsibilities, duties, and skills -- which both the original author and the
commenter did -- there is an underlying assumption that is false. That
assumption is that these things you're supposed to understand and manage are
discrete items. There's a factory metaphor, whether either author realizes
that or not. Ideas come in from the users, bug system, and other places. The
Product Manager assembles and works these ideas, identifying a MVP, breaking
them down into smaller features, and so forth.

Perhaps this could be restated as such: _There is a discrete set of
information and processing that must be done to translate external stimulus
into items ready for work_ (And yes, I think everybody agrees that this
information changes over time, but the assumption is that you fix it in place
at least long enough to go through a release cycle)

This assumption is not true. Yes, there is a discrete set of ideas that need
processing, and the result looks the same -- but not only does the information
change as time moves on, the developers concept of the world the user lives in
changes the more they intimately interact. Now in a small team you join the
team at the hip with some users and it works out. As you scale up, however,
that's not an option, and it's much easier for a developer working as a
Product Manager to spot where the world changed than a person trained only in
management. (A developer who has no product experience in this particular
startup would the same problem, by the way. You're looking to identify
business model impedance mistmatches, places where we were coding for one
universe we thought existed when in fact we were mistaken.)

That's not something you can somehow document or think your way out of, since
so much of "the universe we thought existed" exists as invisible, implied
assumptions. All you can do as an external manager is manage those things you
can identify and record. When you're doing value discovery, the most important
value ideas you'll find start subconsciously and then become visible.

We have this same problem in project management -- conflation of what I can
see, record, and optimize with what the actual work is. In both cases, the
underlying assumption of physicality and how we deal with physical problems
comes into conflict with fluid, fluffy, and ephemeral way that humans actually
think about and work through problems. This is not a problem in a ton of other
areas where there actually is physicality, like hardware-only product
development, where the cycle times are long. (Or at least not in the same
way). But it is when you're doing traditional software-heavy product
management.

Hope that helps. It was on-topic. It's just a difficult thing to write about
in a simple way. Thanks for the feedback.

ADD: One of the things that makes this so difficult is the amount of invisible
and many times unacknowledged work that happens. So you could ask a successful
founder/Product Manager what their job and responsibilities were, and you'd
get a list just like the one provided. Go out and try to execute on that list,
though, and you'd screw it up.

------
jackmodern
waiting for an engineer to jump in here and tell everyone how useless PMs are.

~~~
Stuckinsofa
Maybe because there are so many incompetent PMs? The PM working I'm working
with does not know the product feature set (except for the very basics), does
not have any vision or goals, does not have a systematic approach to talking
to collecting feedback from customers. What's on our backlog changes
dramatically and when project ends we basically start with a new product
backlog. When customers have questions on basic stuff he has to defer to
engineering.

Any competent hire can be useful, but hiring good PMs is maybe even harder
than good engineers. So people bitch.

~~~
polote
Yes it is exactly true, the issue right now in the field of product
management, is most PM are in fact PO (product owner) they manage the sprint.
But these people have the title of product manager.

Product manager is required job in any company that wants to grow and deliver
best products. But these people are very hard to find and very expensive, so
instead we hire PO and give them the title of PM and ask them to do what the
CEO is asking

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villaumbrosia
I'm truly surprised at how many negative sentiments there are in this thread
about the role of Product Managers. Clearly there are some PMs who are more
effective/competent than others, but for many companies, the role is crucial
for success.

As some have already mentioned, the PM is often the person who is kind of a
"utility tool" within the departments. PMs have to be able to communicate
effectively amongst each team, and translate each departments needs into
positive action.

I have also noticed that a lot of answers here are saying that all you need is
a competent engineering lead instead of a PM. I don't agree with this at all.
Engineers are critical to the success of a product, there is no doubt about
that. But they also are generally more of a hard-skills player in the
development of the process. PMs often have to be able to translate the work of
hard-skill colleagues into understandable insights for other stakeholders.
Some may see this as frivolous, but you'd be surprised at how many times I've
seen an engineer deliver a report in a way that was impossible to understand,
and far from relatable.

While this post could literally be pages long, I am going sum up the final
point here: PMs do the work that allows engineers and members of other
departments to focus on their core responsibilities. Engineers don't always
have the time to determine customer needs, assess market competition, develop
sales strategy, move information through departments, or the many other tasks
that are necessary to create a top-tier product. So before jumping to
conclusions about Product Management responsibilities, be sure to do your
homework and see what the best PMs have done to take their businesses into
greener pastures.

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dawhizkid
Seriously one of the most overrated jobs in tech...speaking from experience.

~~~
Judgmentality
Where were you a product manager (assuming you're willing to share) and why
did you feel the position was not particularly useful?

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bg24
I have been a product manager for a decade now, both in established firms and
startups. From my experience, startups need to have the founder and
engineering leader in lockstep, and the experience to productize the vision.
PM role in a startup is more about wearing multiple hats. If you do not have a
solid engineering leader and right engineering experience to build the
product, PM job is simply not worth staying.

In contrast, PM leadership role becomes crucial in an established product, or
even a startup entering into the growth trajectory.

PM responsibilities vary wildly. Being able to sell, build relationship, be at
the right place at the right time etc. decides your success more than your
inbound skills like product requirements, planning etc.

~~~
Brajeshwar
Very true. Right now, I'm helping a Startup on a massive growth curve with
multiple products, new market category, new geographies, et al.

There are a bunch of Product Managers, while a few good engineering leaders
are leading the tech team.

My role is basically to groom the PMs to mostly talking to customers, say NO
to the engineers' cool feature they want to build if they are not yet
validated with customers, say NO to the C-Suite including the CEO of all their
fancy cool business ideas they want to execute. Continue with mini-
experiments, and build a process to do such repeatedly and rinse them well.
Reduce the release cycle and hopefully automate pretty much everything.

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blunderkid
There are good PMs and those pretending/forced to be, just like not all
"hackers" are LinusT. In product minded startups, at least one founder has got
to be a good early stage PM. Most calls in the beginning are gut calls but
good PMs/founders will quickly get in a state where data begins to take over
gut increasingly. Although the best PMs also have the best guts and know when
to trust one over the other.

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amriksohata
Having a Product Manager and a BA is a toxic place to be, the Product Manager
is often too far removed from the questions the engineers will ask

