
Ask HN: Where did all the Product Managers go? - ycskyspeak
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&#x2F;release readiness&#x2F;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?
======
CoffeeDregs
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...

~~~
benjamincburns
> That doesn't mean that Product Management is worthless...

> the real key was the ability to balance product requirements now against
> their long term affects

The problem is that a lot of companies are structured so that this is
impossible for their PMs to accomplish.

Good employees (PMs or otherwise) will always find away to be effective in
spite of the organization. However, if product management is too much under
the thumb of sales, or if they are too much under the thumb of development and
disconnected from sales, they don't have the visibility they need into one end
or the other. Further, there will be pressure from their bosses to advocate
more for their side.

To me, the best PMs are good mediators. Not only do they know how to schedule
requirements and decide scope, they know how to communicate that effectively,
and get buy-in from both sales and development with a minimum of squabbling.
Because of this, if they're capable of doing their job effectively they don't
need sales or development to report directly to them, and likewise they
shouldn't be reporting to either sales or development.

If leadership feels the need to put product management under sales or under
development, chances are they need to hire new PMs.

I completely agree though that good PMs are rare, exceedingly difficult to
hire for, and worth double their weight in gold.

~~~
CoffeeDregs

        >The problem is that a lot of companies are structured so that this
        >is impossible for their PMs to accomplish.
    

Would love to hear more about this since I'm going to be structuring the
engineering, and possibly product, teams for the startup I joined...

    
    
        >get buy-in from both sales and development
    

Totally. People often rant about Sales or Marketing or Engineering, but none
exists without the other. I think the combination of deep technical skills and
a two year tour of duty in Sales (as a Field Applications Engineer) provided
me with the ability to pre-understand each sides' concerns and to communicate
with each more effectively.

    
    
        >If leadership feels the need to put product management under sales
        >or under development, chances are they need to hire new PMs.
    

Yeah, I've seen this first hand two separate times and the constant refrain
from the rest of the company was "why isn't engineering building what our
customer's need?" I do wonder if it's possible. Or advisable. Might be
something that goes bad no matter how well it starts.

~~~
rrrx3
Product Management is its own thing. It doesn't really belong under either of
those. Keeping in mind that org charts influence thinking - rightly or wrongly
- you'd be putting Product Management in a no-win situation when they're meant
to act as intermediaries between engineering and sales.

I'm just joined a startup where Product is its own arm. We sync with Sales and
Engineering, but we push products based on smart decisions. It wasn't always
that way, from what I hear, and it was a slog to get there, but so far from
what I've experienced, it's been well worth it. There's still some work to do,
but it's vastly different from orgs I've been in before, where Product fell
under something else and had little clout to do what needed to be done.

------
cdjk
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.

------
gjmulhol
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.

~~~
inthewoods
Great comment - totally agree with the hostility point.

The best product managers are like the best point guards in basketball. They
see the whole court, deliver the ball right into the hands of the person who
can score at the right moment. Unfortunately, most PMs are like characters in
Office Space.

My theory about why their aren't many PMs out there: it's a shitty job. I was
a PM for around 10 years, but I left it because it's just not a great job in
most orgs. More specifically, it is generally a job of "no" as opposed to a
job of "yes", and is a job that lacks any real authority in most cases.

~~~
olegious
What do you now?

------
overgard
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.

~~~
crimsonalucard
I agree. Essentially, good product managers should have all the skills
necessary to be a designer or developer as well.

------
tptacek
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.

------
jhwhite
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.

------
poolpool
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.

------
pascalo
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.

~~~
maxsilver
> 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.

So, you'd like to be a PM then?

~~~
pascalo
Not really. I'd rather work in an agile team with a proper product owner aka
customer on board, where the whole team can discuss cost vs benefit of each
individual feature and then act accordingly.

~~~
USNetizen
That setup rarely ever works. There needs to be a person to interact with the
customer. Developers don't work well with customers.

A good PM will discuss options with the team, but they will serve as the
interface through which the customer communicates with the team. The customer
does not care how things get done, only that they get done on time.

~~~
pascalo
"Developers don't work well with customers"

Why does it have to be like that? This sort of silo thinking is probably what
created the disconnect in the first place.

The customer might care about how things get done, if it means the difference
between getting 85% of their wish list done or 50%, all depending on one
obscure feature.

Agile/SCRUM can make the potential complexity of a feature more visible
because it's a team estimate. It also can make the decision process less laggy
because the customer/product owner sits in on the team. Finally it can make
the end goal more visible to the Devs, resulting in less of a disconnect.

My 2p

~~~
maxsilver
It's not so much that it "has to be like that", in that your merging two
different roles, without finishing your thought. Your arguing for good project
management, and practicing good project management, while telling yourself +
others that it's "no project management."

There is no such thing as "no PM". Such a concept can't exist (for the same
reason that "no developers" can't exist). There's actual work there, that
someone has to do, or nothing gets built.

Now, it's totally fine if you say "I think it's best if all of our team
members spend 75% of their time as developers, and 25% of their time as
project managers". That's what you've just described above, and (in my
opinion) there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

But your misleading yourself if you claim "PM's aren't needed because Agile",
or "PM's aren't needed because the one's I've met 'silo' us off". All you've
done is shift the PM burden from a specific person, to some/all of your
developers. Your developers are now actually "part-time developers, part-time
PM's"

There's also some weird assumptions that your making around PM's. PM's do not
have to silo developers away from the client (and good ones don't). PM's do
not have to estimate for devs (good ones always use team estimates).

I've seen developers write buggy code, or brittle tests. But I would never say
"developers aren't needed". You've clearly encountered bad PM's, and that's
very unfortunate. But that doesn't mean "PM isn't needed", and as you yourself
just described, you already have to pick up that work on your own since you
lack one on your team.

~~~
pascalo
All good points, and I agree with you that project management as a task isn't
going away. Of course my original comment was coined towards the agency style
workplace (and meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek), that's where I experienced
the worst permutations of the role.

I'm not saying that there aren't any good ones somewhere else, but I just
haven't really met any.

------
eldavido
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.

------
phillc73
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.

~~~
olegious
"Would much rather now be something, anything, other than a Product Manager."
Why?

------
pstachio
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.

------
tamireiss
"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.

------
cnorgate
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.

~~~
pascalo
So, within an SCRUM/agile process, where do you see the PM role? The scrum
master? The product owner?

~~~
PaulHoule
I worked at a place where agile failed because (1) the "Product Manager" was
AWOL (he punched a timecard but never seemed to put stories in) and (2) the
lead developer refused to put in estimate for everything. (As the one
developer who actually put in estimates, I just got abuse because my estimates
were "too long")

~~~
pascalo
Sounds like a nightmare! Nothing worse than an environment where you get
blamed for estimating something.

I too have worked in places that called themselves Agile but where everything
but.

On the other hand I also was part of a well adjusted SCRUM team where the
roles were fulfilled properly and we rolled through the project like a steam
train. The key was to have a really well filled backlog and then wear most of
the pain during the sprint estimation meetings, and the whole team sat in on
that. This made everybody understand all the features and their potential
complexity before the sprint even started, and gave full visibility of the
cost of each of these to the product owner, who could de-prioritise something
or swap it out in that very session. The actual sprints then were really
straight forward and I really enjoyed myself there.

Prior to that I had plenty of contracts where I get "specs" from PMs, but then
have to question each aspect of those, often resulting in me having to ask the
product owner myself to decipher what it meant. Inevitably, nobody ever had
time and I spent 50% of my day waiting for people getting back to me or work
on whatever I could come up with.

------
Sindrome
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.

------
codeinchaos
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.

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

------
jejune06
Square has Product Editors.

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

------
Spooky23
In big companies these people are often called Enterprise Architects or
Solutions Architects nowadays.

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

~~~
mattdeboard
Product managers aren't idea people. They're not supposed to be, anyway.

They interview, the gather data, they build consensus around requirements,
then deliver those requirements to development. _Development_ is where the
ideas happen.

Unfortunately, though, I think I know why you say this. Product management
should not be about coming up with (read: dictating) ideas & implementation to
product. It happens though and it's annoying as hell.

~~~
Sindrome
I think this is the case in a FB, What's App, or Tinder startup. But if you
are in an advanced field like Medical, Law, etc. Then you need Product people
with specializations to discuss with development and refine requirements.

