
The lost cult of Microsoft program managers - anuraggoel
http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2009/the-lost-cult-of-microsoft-program-managers/
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jbarciauskas
1 point by jbarciauskas 0 minutes ago | link | edit | delete

To better understand the position Scott's referring to here, I recommend
reading this Joel Spolsky article:
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000034.html> Of course, Spolsky
was a program manager at Microsoft in the same time frame as Scott. I can
understand why a cult of this sort would be incredibly fragile. This sort of
position has to be the absolute hardest position to hire for. We have all read
about and/or experienced the difficulty of hiring a good engineer, but being a
great engineer requires a well-definted set of skills - a strong understanding
of and demonstrated experience with technical topics. A program manager, or a
functional lead as they are called in many other contexts, has to have a blend
of the technical and fuzzy skills that are almost impossible to identify,
because the proper blend is very ill-defined.

A great program manager may not be able to write quicksort in Lisp off the top
of his head, but should have a strong comptuer science foundation and
understand the implications of various technical choices. At the same time,
the program manager has to be able to communicate options and choices between
team members with differing views, help structure the discussions around those
options and bring everyone to a consensus as to the correct path to follow.
The program manager must be gregarious and active in stimulating
communication, but without that technical edge he will lose all credibility
with his team.

By virtue of having these skills, however, as Joel argues, the program manager
is able to drastically improve the productivity of everyone around him, but
without having x lines of code or other quantifiable metrics to show for it,
other than "shipped on time".

It is not hard to see how a position like this could fall out of the A people
hiring other A people and into the B people hiring C people trap quickly.

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rantfoil
I was a PM for Microsoft around 2003, and remember taking a few great classes
from Scott Berkun.

In retrospect I wonder if the existence of the role itself is cause for so
much of the slowness within Microsoft. The PM role became not so much a role
as a cleanup/do-everything kind of position.

Unfortunately so many people end up just being gatekeepers or secretaries that
actually get in the way of people getting work done, instead of visionary
thinkers and doers that help things get done. I think Scott is on to something
when he says that people now feel like 3 hour meetings, disheveled teams and
failing products seem NORMAL. Someone needs to clean up the PM role, and I
think that will clean up the lack of innovation at Microsoft.

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bprater
Perhaps its time for a new CEO at Microsoft.

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known
I think proliferation of Web has diluted the need for Program Managers.

~~~
jwilliams
Not sure I follow?

