

Ask HN: HN for PMs? - orky56

I was curious if there was a niche site like HN that caters to less technical-more product management folk. I personally filter a lot of HN posts for the ones really pushing stuff for product and browse relevant Quora topics. I imagine though that the product guys (who are as mature and intelligent as the HN crowd) must sit on some site and discuss stuff. Any suggestions for where to look?
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SoftwareMaven
I'd love that. I put a proposal on StackExhange, but it hasn't made it very
far: [http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/28281/product-
mana...](http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/28281/product-management)

I also made a subreddit a long time ago, but also to no avail:
<http://www.reddit.com/r/ProductManagement/>

There's a lot that goes through #prodmgmt on Twitter, but that is too
ephemeral in nature.

At this point (combined with being vice president of the Utah Product
Management Association(, I've come to these conclusions:

\- Many (not a majority!) PMs are completely unaware of what they don't know,
so they don't go looking for answers

\- Many PMs psychologically need to be in the middle of everything (it's part
of the reason they want to be PMs), which sucks down massive amounts of time,
leaving little time left for book learning.

\- Many PMs are thrown into the job with no real understanding of what a PM
should do. As a result, they do the two things they understand, leaving the
other 20 boxes in the Pragmattic Framework empty (and there isn't much need to
learn about them as a result).

I know I'm bagging on PMs, but i actually think most PMs genuinely try their
hardest and most of those are reasonably good.

There's one other critical piece that I think hurts more than all of the
above: PM is a poorly defined role, ranging everywhere from bizdev to project
management to business analyst to development manager. It is really hard to
get two people to agree on what a PM is, so it is equally hard to find content
that is equally interesting to all.

If you do find a good community, please let me know!

~~~
orky56
Wow you really did your research and took initiative on this issue! I can't
understand why/how PMs don't have an outlet for this. From the links you
shared it seems that PMs are still having an identity crisis in terms of who
they are and what their profession means. Coming from UX, I thought that was a
confused bunch (circa 2-3 yrs ago) but at least they were pretty vocal and
created a variety of info sites/blog, even if not traditional forums.

Would love to chat with you about PM in general however. No office hours?

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Hours ran out and I forgot to reset them. New hours are posted, but feel free
to ping me any time.

