
Show HN: Best and free resources to learn product management - yilunzh
http://yilunzh.com/pm
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tsunamifury
Product management is fast becoming the garbage role of wannabe middle
managers who lack expertise in engineering, design, or marketing. It's cute to
put together a list of suggestions, but each of these areas are better handled
by experts. After years as a PM I learned it was a role that was only
nessecary when you have B level or worse talent that can't self manage or
don't know what they are doing. In a team of A players no one needs a go-
between pretending to have expertise and arbitraging credit while playing
telephone.

I left my senior PM role to become a lead designer at Google and I have never
once looked back. Now I take pride in having expertise derived from hands on
work critical to a product along with my peers in engineering and marketing.
My instincts for strategy are sharper than my former bumbling PMs who are in
meetings all day. Product management is now fighting irrelevance as it
continually strives for a purpose as they slump toward extinction.

The greatest tip you could give an aspiring PM is to quit and pursue a
worthwhile role that contributes to the product in a meaningful way.

~~~
yilunzh
I agree that a PM who simply play the role of a telephone between design,
engineering and marketing is indeed useless...though i disagree that PM in
general add no value building product, even in a team of A players.

You work at google, and google is a place full of A players. It also happens
to have hundreds if not thousands of product managers. Surely they are not
there to just look pretty.

I can't speak for you, but from my own experience, I get into the weeds with
engineers on technical tradeoff and debate over user experience with my
designer on a daily basis. I run user testing, I scowl over metrics to
understand what's working vs what's not. If that's not contributing to the
product in a meaningful way, I don't know what is. I hope at some point, you
get to work with a PM that is able to do that with you.

~~~
kevinskii
Most product managers, in my experience, greatly overestimate their own level
of knowledge. Your whole post smacks of this too, and when you say you "get
into the weeds" on technical tradeoffs, it's quite likely that you're wasting
the engineers' time trying to debate things that are either utterly
inconsequential or are obviously wrong to anyone with a basic grasp of the
technology.

Also when you refer to engineers and designers as being "yours," this is a
huge red flag. They are not your subordinates--at least not in any company
that's worth working for. You would do yourself well not to think of them as
such.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _Also when you refer to engineers and designers as being "yours," this is a
> huge red flag._

I think you're reading too much into a common shorthand for "engineers who I
work with".

People also say "my friends", "my family", "my workmates", "my boss", "my bus
driver", "my doctor" and so on without implying subordination.

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kelukelugames
Please retitle.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

"For example, blog posts, email signups, and fundraisers can't be tried out,
so they don't count as Show HNs."

------
harryf
Thanks for publishing - great read.

~~~
yilunzh
Thanks harry!

