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| | Ask HN: Where did all the Product Managers go? | |
47 points by ycskyspeak on June 1, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 51 comments |
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| 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/release readiness/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? |
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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...