

Ask HN: Boss with Steve Jobs Complex - rosenthyme

Dear Community Members,<p>I find myself in a difficult situation, but one I imagine must be common in the industry -- MY BOSS HAS A STEVE JOBS COMPLEX.  It would be unfair to say he is like Steve Jobs, because the Steve Jobs we all love was relentlessly dedicated to his projects, but my boss is not.  Let me explain --<p>My boss was appointed Project Manager, but he also wants to be Product Manager.  He insists that we all absorb his <i>vision</i> and build out the product and code it.  However, he refuses to detail out each screen, behaviors, and the like.  When we try to build out the screens&#x2F;behaviors, he cites it as a waste of time and directs us to code out the vision.<p>Naturally, the results are usually misaligned with his vision, and we get chewed out and humiliated publicly.  There are often mentions about how he is a visionary and needs a team that can march to that vision.<p>Our boss is very successful and insightful, but has never been a product manager.  He refuses to acknowledge Product Management as a role and insists we should have the startup mentality where everyone has every role -- yet does not want to slog through the difficulty of defining the user experience.<p>He is very hard-working but has many responsibilities and only dedicates about 4 hours a week to this project.  Is this project destined for failure?
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greenyoda
I have no way of knowing whether your project is destined for failure. But to
me that would be almost irrelevant - if I had a boss who humiliated people
(publicly or privately), I'd be looking for work elsewhere. I wouldn't have
put up with that kind of abuse even from Steve Jobs himself.

~~~
rosenthyme
I have read so many stories of tough personalities like this who chew out
their people publicly, yet in the process achieve greatness for themselves,
their teams, and their products. I supposed I would have accepted this if I
were working for Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Steve Ballmer, so I keep wondering
if I should just suck it up and grind on.

But coding-to-vision rather than coding-to-design/spec seems so inefficient.
Is this common?

~~~
greenyoda
_" I have read so many stories of tough personalities like this who chew out
their people publicly, yet in the process achieve greatness for themselves,
their teams, and their products."_

Honestly, this doesn't sound like that kind of guy. From what you described,
he's "all hat and no cattle" (as they say in Texas).

~~~
rosenthyme
thank you for your thoughts on this. -going crazy

------
sumanthvepa
I've unfortunately been in the position of your boss in the past. In some of
my early product management/project management roles, I would wave my hands
write a few emails, one-pagers and expect the developers and designers would
grok the vision and build something beautiful. Surprisingly, in my first
experience, the outcome was wonderful -- the product was beautiful. At that
time, I was naive and vainglorious enough to believe that the reasons for it
were my 'vision'. The actual reason was a team of world class ux designers,
visual designers and developers, who understood what I needed and created the
product. The creative vision was theirs. So in some sense your boss is right,
he doesn't have a unicorn team who can translate his day dreams into product.

On the other hand he is also profoundly wrong. Skip a few years, and I started
up on my own, and could no longer afford those unicorn designers and
developers. Now mere vision was no longer sufficient, I had to deal with
actually firing up Photoshop and Illustrator and going from there all the way
to writing HTML/CSS/JS, even the backend python for a prototype (Fortunately,
I've always loved coding.) The learning was profound. Translating vision(even
your own, leave alone others') into attractive product is a difficult skill
that every serious product owner must understand. And they can only do so by
doing (they may never master it). I'm not anywhere as good as those unicorn
UX/devs I worked with in the past, but I compensate for it somewhat with,
meticulous communication, verbal discussions, wireframes, mocks, sketches,
functional prototypes, whatever, to get the product I want. Then I iterate the
hell out of it by getting feedback. Learning to interpret subtle signs of
friction in a users' experience was hugely valuable. The results have been
good though slow.

If your boss is refusing to acquire the requisite translation skills, you will
need to acquire them (and you will probably be the gainer in the bargain)

My advice to you here is to do the following:

1\. Ignore the public shaming, if possible, and focus on your boss's message.
Iterate on design concept despite his demeaning you for mistakes. It may
eventually make you the unicorn developer/designer. At the very least even if
you realize you don't have a talent for design, you will understand where your
own limits lie.

2\. Understand that the kind of people your boss is looking for do exist. They
are not easily found, and are usually very expensive. So help your boss find
one if possible. Learn from these people.

3\. When you've gotten these skills, please email me your resume. :-) (Just
kidding)

------
davismwfl
Maybe, maybe not.

I worked with a guy as a contractor where he swears he was a Steve Jobs.
Realistically, all he was is a guy with lots of ideas and no follow thru. So
he wasn't a Steve Jobs at all and most all his visions totally violated good
design principles. When I would point that out he would say because his
thoughts were visionary and not yet known.

Yea, and I fart unicorns dancing and rainbows.

In the end, you have to evaluate for yourself, but in general if people don't
have a loyal following, but expect that type of respect they are no Steve
jobs. I have had some AMAZING leaders, and they inspired us to do great
things. They would never spend only 4 hours on a project they believed in, and
they would expect more from us. I am not saying you should quit tomorrow, but
I personally refuse to help feed anyones ego like this.

And I am sorry, the idea of just doing it without getting some design guidance
seems really stupid. I know the stuff we read about Jobs says he didn't need
mock ups etc, but I totally think that is BS. He was a smart ass guy who
likely had tons of mock ups before he ever said go to the next step. Reading
his book, he commissioned projects and prototypes that showed design but
weren't yet functional (IIRC), so no that isn't a Jobs type mentality, that is
a God mentality and is just idiotic.

BTW no real leader publicly humiliates his team, it is counter productive. Yes
some great visionaries have done it, but in todays world we know that is a bad
idea and to nurture not humiliate people, so its just BS. BUT that doesn't
mean you don't push them hard (which can be a fine line) and demand better
from everyone.

~~~
sj0000
"Idea guys" are mostly useless: the people that want credit for "thinking of
something" and kick back while everyone else works. More often than not,
they're deluded and "in love" with "their" "great" ideas that deny reality in
high-def cognitive dissonance. (They're usually wantrepreneurs or enterprise
busywork titles.)

What set SJ apart was positive value (being right more often than not,
building people up to produce better work products than they thought the
could, a determined direction, actual vision) on balance outweighing negative
traits (histrionic tantrums, treating employees like shit, generally acting
like an asshole).

 __A cautionary note: __If someone is going to play the eccentric jerk role,
they 'd better be actually right nearly always and bring metric fucktons of
net positive value by the containership-full to the business, staff,
customers, partners and other stakeholders.

~~~
davismwfl
Totally agree.

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atak1
I've had to deal with this exact situation in the past, and I went through the
same rationale.

My experience: you wind up constantly iterating, hoping for small "wins" \-
where the expectations of your PM matches something you've produced. But these
are far and few in-between.

You need world-class people who've lead projects to save and push things
forward. The success of the project depends on whether you have someone on the
team who's willing to stand up and push their own vision, and whether your PM
is willing to budge. You WILL have to do mockups to some fidelity, just
realize that your PM won't appreciate the work and the complexity that goes
into it.

------
seekingcharlie
I've lead design & PM at several startups & I can basically tell straight-out,
that building without a design, wireframe, or at the very least a written spec
is completely inefficient & it's likely that you will have to rebuild this all
later. Basically every company I've worked had a similar process in place
(often lead by the CEO) - this process does not scale & it will cause
technical debt to your engineering team.

For all I know, this guy may actually be some product visionary, but why isn't
he telling this vision to designers to create the mocks so the intricacies are
worked out before it gets to build? Is it because he doesn't believe this
process would move quick enough?

Also, one huge flag for me is that not once in your post did you mention that
his "vision" was based off feedback of users. This is the most important task
of a product manager (collecting user feedback & filtering it back to
engineering). In the past, I've also had hunches about how things should work
& I've proven myself completely wrong either after asking users or in
usability tests on the build I designed.

Remember, Steve Jobs was designing products for the average person - not a lot
of startups target such a blanket market & most are targeting some subset
niche. You really need to be a voice for the users you're targeting.

------
soroso
I had similar experience, however in my case I built what my boss wanted. And
he was happy. I managed this not by magic, but the beginning of my story
looked strikingly similar to yours. And, of course, the project didn't fail.

So yeah, his method is not _that_ wrong. But there's a catch: in the beginning
he was really interesting in pico-iterations. So not only I was doing, but
every hour or so we were discussing what the screen looked like, going to the
lengths of adding fake buttons that did not do anything, but helped to reason
about the application.

After few years (you read it right), we no longer needed to talk a lot about
what the company needed. Usually he would point to a problem to be solved,
what he would like to see, and the development team managed to fill the gaps.

More recently, in another company with another boss, at a certain point she
appraised the team for not really having to fill the gaps of understanding for
the team: she spit a vision and we do it in our way. Every iteration she
validates it, and of course ask for changes. Pretty average.

I think the real problem in your case is the attitude : public scolding and
humiliation. For this, I have two alternatives.

If you are vested with stocks or somehow protected by some strong contract,
and believe in the idea, the solution is to bark back. Abusive behavior are
always multiplied by lack of balance and checks.

If you are just a developer, with zero personal benefits than compensation,
the solution to your problem is quitting. Suddenly. Even if you do not have
another job in sight.

The reason of this sudden quit is to ensure you halt the damage to you well
being while staying in this company. The damage is and will be there: days you
don't feel like working, arriving very late and leaving very soon, avoid
opportunities, apathetic feedback when approached by people etc etc. In the
right intensity, even depression. (well if you're in US you might want to
actually get depressed and ask for compensation in court. Probably will give
you more money).

Good luck.

~~~
rosenthyme
Thank you for your thoughts. I think pico-iterations would be wonderful, and
that is the big problem -- we meet twice a week (he has dedicated 4hrs a week
and sometimes not even that.) Way too much time goes by before we test whether
the build-out matches the vision. This makes it more disheartening because
there is often so much wasted work.

However, I'm glad this worked out well for you -- I am going to try to split
the 4hours more evenly, perhaps into at-least a daily review. Part of the
problem is he seems to think we are all wrong in requiring all these reviews,
rather we should simply implement the vision rather than just talking about it
over and over.

------
herm
I think you should work through the details with your team and own the project
and defend your decisions. He can only humiliate you if you believe what he is
saying. There are people you just can't please, however, that is how he is
pushing you to be great. That is probably why he is successful.

To be honest I have never received even 4 hours per week from a manager, on a
consistent basis. You need to manage him like he is upper management or a
client, he will ask the impossible, not tell you how to succeed, and expect
everything.

Build what he needs, and persuade him as to why it is great. He wont express
the details because even he doesn't really know.

------
secretmillion
You're lucky that your boss at least has a vision.

~~~
suyash
true that :)

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theandrewbailey
Does he at least give feedback? Is it useful? Do the other team members work
on this project for a similar amount of time? If not, you need to have a
manager that has more time to dedicate to you and give the support needed. If
the project is behind schedule, mention it to stakeholders or higher
management.

~~~
rosenthyme
@theandrewbailey yes, he does give feedback, about once every several days.
However, three days of coding can be wiped out with one piece of feedback.
This is frustrating since it could have been nipped earlier on during a design
session. Is it common for people to code-to-vision rather than code-to-design?

~~~
theandrewbailey
It doesn't really matter the methodology used, but there is always (should
be?) some written design, requirements, or specification somewhere. I've only
ever been on "corporate" type projects where lots of stuff has been defined in
advance. I find it really nice, because I can focus on implementing things,
not designing, envisioning, or winging things. While malleable to some extent,
it's not like a new concept could be inserted.

It might also help to know who this product is for. Is it a B2B/internal or
B2C project?

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tsotha
>Is this project destined for failure?

Probably. You should probably have a heart to heart with this guy and tell him
how you feel without evasions or minced words.

In the end you're a professional, and professionals don't need to tolerate bad
behavior on the part of an employer.

------
suyash
How can a Project Manager boss around the requirements and judge the
implementation - that is a job of a Product Manager and Dev or Design
managers? Project Managers should mostly focus on the team finishing projects
on time - like an Agile coach.

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paulsutter
You are in a shitty situation. Focus on finding a great job, and avoid
investing emotionally in this one.

