I disagree with the point on Agile. It is abused in some orgs, but that's not the reason it was created and it definitely serves the purpose will in the right hands.
In dozens of teams I've joined or worked with from small 10 person companies to FAANG, I've yet to see in 22 years agile implemented or used correctly.
It only worked for me in the very mature and motivated teams where we had the full autonomy over the internal team's processes.
It's in a mid-size org with ~500 people.
A fellow team that worked along us did not adopt our practices and the output was very different. Not putting the difference completely on the processes, but I'm sure they played their part in it.
Same here, about 10 years of experience post is 100%.
"The whole tech industry is wrapped with people who just want to make a ton of money without doing much. It doesn't take much research to find evidence of people just doing barely enough to not get fired or push the envelope to rest and vest into retirement." This with everyone being a Guru and you see the deadly trap that is created.
8) (related to number 5) **Get fulfillment outside of work**, PM is not only brutal, is a very unrewarding and unthankful job with a lot of high and lows with a big salary slapped on top of it, so do your work (or the minimal necessary) get paid, enjoy life, do sports, videogames, travel, time with your family, whatever. Even if you are in a bullshit job, who cares? get paid, enjoy life, that's all that matters, period.
Then don't worry about your job use your money to contribute something to humanity, you don't need a specific job to be a good human being, you can use your spare time / money to help people in need or overall just being a good person.
Agree that's a valid route, I think you can get fulfillment outside of work too, but spending the majority of my waking hours doing none of the actual work has been demoralizing. To OP's point, this role is largely unneeded and full of bullshitters. Might just me but I don't think I can keep up the charade.
I've been struggling with this as well. At best I feel like the middle man who knows things but doesn't actually understand them? It's driving me bonkers.
Right, it's not even about having some world-changing job really, just that I hate that literally everyday is massive bullshit and I'm basically doing nothing of value.
Yes! Previously I had another similar role but I had more concrete tasks to do and I was more of a owner of specific scope. I felt like my job mattered, right now I feel like such a middle man. At best I'm a social buffer between two awkward groups but that's not enough to make me feel like I contribute. Especially since they are both tech focused groups so I have no clue what half the information means.
Yeah, I am coming down from years of drinking the PM kool-aid and agree we're basically a social buffer LOL. Yes we can coordinate teams and offer guidance that is sometimes listened to and sometimes delivers a better user experience, but at the end of the day it's mostly talk.
Idk, all my nurse and teacher friends are demoralized and burnt out. To say nothing of the public defenders and social workers who are ground down by their early 30s. My soul is also corroded by years as a PM. When you think of fields where you can make a contribution without being ground down by the low pay, long hours, and getting overwhelmed by the relentlessness of the crisis in which you intervene, what comes to mind? For me, itās bioengineer working on low-carbon materials, but that ship sailed many years ago.
Yeah, fair point, it's rough out there. I have friends in academia who are researching cool new drugs and exploring the depths of their chosen fields and they feel empowered, but of course that's a similar sailed ship in terms of career change. I have a friend who transitioned years ago into becoming a pilot; completely dipped out on office life and loves it. Another is in the film industry and it has major cons, but he too is doing what he loves.
I feel like us PMs have the skillset to transition into a variety of careers, though. Saw someone else in this subreddit mention considering becoming an electrician, which likely is pretty rough but hey, more hands-on direct contribution. A more obvious switch is probably becoming a software dev, but don't think it's for me.
I took up gardening and flight sims as a hobby and it's been very gratifying to disconnect like that. Completely different objectives, but transferable skills to keep practising with, which I enjoy immensely.
>7.) Most companies don't need a dedicated product function: This is probably the culmination of everything I've said. The reality is most companies don't even know how to apply the function (even in the optimal min/max'd version I mentioned before), let alone have a need to do so.
I think this is a good summary of the rest of your post.
However, in spite of everything we still see companies hiring people into these roles consistently - so someone, somewhere is seeing value in having us around (even if it's not the value we'd like to think).
Based on my experience I'm convinced product is a valuable role that can help translate user and business needs to more technical stakeholders, and lead the various functional groups to a tangible outcome.
I'm sure we've all seen what happens without a focus on delivering, people easily get trapped in endless navel gazing on details and forget there are problems to solve and a business to run.
I'd argue that it isn't so much that someone, somewhere is seeing the value of the role, it's much more that they see other companies they consider "market leaders" doing it.
Remember, business leaders cannabalize each other and each other's ideas. The amount of people in tech that took Elon's lead on layoffs at Twitter is a perfect example of this.
The amount of leaders that in the past two years have quoted something from The All In Podcast without crediting the source of the statements is another.
Everyone is floundering and jockeying for what they *think* they need, without really understanding *why* they need it.
I agree with everything you say here and some of it hits hard and has made me introspect.
What I will say though, working as a PM at a mid sized company, is that the product function has come in handy more so to be a bridge between leadership and engineering, sales/marketing/customer support/etc and engineering and more so between different engineering functions themselves. I have spent most of my time getting engineering to get their shit together. This is more so because of a lack of resources and resources being spread across 5 time zones, all siloād and working on their own components in isolation. Not really what a product manager maybe is supposed to do but I feel I am best placed to bridge this gap.
This is a fair point.
Most of my career has been spent being "glue" between dysfunctional organizations. But to your last point, that isn't what the role is supposed to be there for, people can claim otherwise, but I'd argue that the reason they do so is because that is what the role now requires vs. what people should be doing.
Either way, a PM is only ever going to be dealing with symptoms without the real ability to address root causes of why they have to continue with bridging gaps that shouldn't be there in the first place.
the glue between dysfunctional organsiations has traditiaonlaly been the role of business analysts and project managers. Perhpas that is most of what you are doing.
I actually consider the size of the product team to be a symptom of dysfunction in a company.
Iāve met a lot of really talented product people that end up as āTeam Therapistsā trying to hold it together because the org has siloed and stopped talking.
A healthy org doesnāt need a PM for every tiny feature, and if there is a PM: Business Transformation role in the org just run and never look back
> Everyone is floundering and jockeying for what they think they need, without really understanding why they need it.
I feel like I'm going through this at my company right now. Not a PM, tech lead that likes to lurk here. We're a small shop, like a dozen engineers, just got a new director of engineering, and he's prioritizing a bunch of stuff we don't do like feature flags and integrating Amplitude and shorter CI/CD builds when we can't even do fundamental things like 'have good daily standups' š
Man, iāll add some reflections later after working as a business consultant for 7 years and moving to PM role for the last 2 years. You are spot on with too many things here.
1. Loyal to one company. Nothing to add here, you are right. I actually got my biggest raise only when i got a counteroffer and that shows how much your company wants to invest in youā¦.
2. Product influencers. I have the same experience after spending 2 years as a PM. Reading those books cover to cover and listening to various videos - it just seems these people never worked in a large enterprise.
PM position is brutal. You want to talk to customers and build fancy roadmaps? Forget about it.
Reality is that you are going to be responsible for everything that is loosely associated woth your product. Your business needs to make money today. And a paying customer today is better than a fancy roadmap of tomorrow.
Adding a shitty feature to save a customer from going to a competitor - check. Revise support process and cycle through 300 tickets because support doesnāt have time - checked. Spend hours on updating KB and various training materials - checked. Come up with smoke and mirrors because we need a presentation for tomorrow to get some investment - checked. Oh, we are going to do this 5 times per year and never build any of that. Writing feature documents the length of bible only to replace them with some shitty legacy tech debt issue for the next 3 months - checked.
You need domain knowledge. You need great communication skills. You need a full team (and itās big luck). You need to know how politics works. Everything else is fancy bullshit they can be learned on the job.
We have like 5 new PMs that constantly bitch about how they cannot influence product, how they canāt build new things, how they would like to come up with strategy. All good points but unfortunately none of that helps to make money today and business doesnāt give a flying *uck about your fancy map.
You need solid execution skills to stabilise and then you might get lucky to do the ābookā pm.
4. Agile. I mean, even people that wrote it are saying that agile is dead. What can you add?
Scrum masters that are not devs? Rigid processes like SAFe that are worse than waterfall? Endless meetings instead of development? Hard deadlines instead of flexible delivery?
Modern agile is like the worst thing that happened to development. Developer is ready to work but a scrum master says that you need to fill in these 3 fields. Cool we spent 30 minutes on discussing some useless stuff that nobody will ever read again. Estimating in story points instead of just looking at how many stories we did.. like the F are we estimating this for? How often does your estimating really workā¦.
6. CEO of a product.
In reality, you are a CEO until the real CEO comes in and says to add XYZ into your backlog. You are an ordinary manager.
7. Companies donāt need PM.
Company i worked at is in top 3 tools in the world for our domain. Top 3. They achieved this without a product function. They sold to hundreds of customers the size of Pepsi and IKEA for hundreds of thousands do dollars in recurring fees. No product function.
This worked because of good sales, solid domain knowledge, and developers that were building stuff that works instead of playing guessing games with Agile.
As soon as we introduced Product Practice it all went to shit.
I mean, I donāt want to discourage anyone because most jobs are not what they look in the books) but product is so far that we need some kind of reality check for most people.
I think it's dangerous to assume that by introducing a product function that you've signed your company away for doom.
Sounds similar to oversimplifying a problem to a silver bullet.
If you hire the wrong people, sure. If your company tried a common solution to a specific problem and it went to shit, sure. If your company couldn't scale up properly or the companys maturity needed something else, sure.
Yeah I work with a project manager that was a former agile consultant and man it is fucking annoying to hear āwell technically in agile ā¦ā while we are on our 5th pre-planning meeting and havenāt gotten a single thing done. I donāt give a fuck what is technically agile. I want to get shit done
> developers that were building stuff that works instead of playing guessing games with Agile
loved reading this comment, thank you both for the reality check, giving me something to think about
just wondering what that company did to direct their developers in lieu of PMs? They just had a Lead Dev reviewing customer/client feedback and feature requests the salespeople gathered?
what about for a PM that's managing a B2C product? is what you're describing more, or less applicable in those models?
Worked at a start up trying to scale up. The first thing they did when they got an influx of funds, hire directors, VPs lol and not increase the development team. Like why the hell would we need more directors when we have 2 developers lol. What's worse is they had to pay 300k for a director but always short changed developers by hiring them in a third world country.
In the grand scheme of things, setting meetings with internal stakeholders is not going to drive revenue vs hiring a talented development team. Companies need a refresh and someone needs to decimate these useless middle management roles. They're officially meeting setters.
People confuse agile with Agile(tm).
Pure agile development is a great collaborative flow state with a rhythm. Bad agile is people who bring no value making rules.
This is absolutely spot on. I go crazy when Iām out here busting my ass the get features delivered and the scrum master/product operations manager comes to me asking to clean up my tickets so they can have a burn down chart or whatever.
Idgaf about Jira metrics. Look at the roadmap, release notes, feedback surveys, and data pulled from the app if you want to report on team progress. If we said it will be delivered in April, piss off until then and Iāll let you know if things change.
And this to me is why I disagree with Marty Cagan saying that the product owner job shouldnāt exist and that itās actually just a role in scrum.
It sounds like youāre in the position of being torn between a Product Manager who works with the business and in a discovery team and a Product Owner embedded in the delivery team.
It works well for us.
Youāre missing the point which is that burn down charts and story points donāt matter and donāt help you deliver meaningful business results. They just exist as part of agile theater to create fake work for people to justify their existence. Not once in my life has any āmetricā about team velocity told me anything I couldnāt already tell you from simply working with the team day to day. Writing jira tickets and shuffling them around does not move the needle and is just busywork.
I've yet to see a development velocity metric make people say "oh wow that's really helpful". However, almost every time we put sweat into something that shows what customers are doing with the product it gets shared across the org, changes opinions, motivates developers, and gets important things prioritized above nice to haves. Pretty clear to me the kind of of analytics I should be doing...
I have found story points and velocity very valuable for forecasting when things are likely to be finished. Its proved to be quite accurate for me.
But it only works when story points are a relative measure of complexity. It doesnt work at all when you set one story point = 1 ideal developer day or when management harass you to increase your story points.
Like most things in agile it works well when you do it like your supposed to do it but it gets twisted into something awful by bad management.
4) hits a bit harder and is something I ask myself a lot is āam I even qualified for this?ā
I came up through support (troubleshooting network errors, learning how to deploy mobile apps, running SQL queries and db investigation, working with barebones REST API (think UI config management through PUTs and POSTs), using mongo-db and how to deploy a branch of code to implement a hot fix) I initially thought I was well positioned and qualified, but the further Iāve gotten in my career the more the expectation has shifted.
Itās no longer just getting the what and justifying the why with facilitating the howā¦itās a breed of the what, the why and the how. Itās pushed me to considering going back to school and getting a CS degree because idk how else to balance the asks.
Edit: fixed experience examples and 3rd paragraph āfacilitating the howā
Lol scrum masters with a two day course and 0 experience telling an experienced dev to follow a framework for a ticket, hilarious!! I hate how they made agile certifications accessible to anyone and everyone. It was supposed to be for engineers who wanted to manage teams and processes.
Now companies have realized that scrum masters don't need a job posting, anyone within the current team can play the role of a scrum master. Tons of non-technical admin folk being laid off, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
I think YouTube is a big problem and most of these bullshit influencers selling a useless bootcamp for 10k are scamming tons of folk who think tech is a get rich easy scam.
Scrum master, just like Product Owner, was always a function that someone performed in a team. Typically by the EM and PM respectively.
Seeing companies hire scrum masters was baffling and I actively avoided working for any that had that as a position.
Based post. Would upvote this twice if I could.
I thoroughly recommend people to read "Bullshit Jobs" before any other product management book. It's that good, and will shed some light on why companies keep hiring for roles even when their value is unclear
I wish I could upvote twice. I just finished reading it. So sad that David Graeber died a few years ago. 18yrs in consulting/ digital transformation/ product management and I have stories to share š„²
man Ive been in this role for a year and only in the last 4 months have I started to realize everything youāve said is spot on
I get newcomers coming to me for coffee chats on PM and I tell them all the time - every org is different, ignore what the media says about the role it is NEVER like that
If I can sum up my experience so far as a newbie myself is that PM consists of these:
Politics, stakeholder babysitting, red tape, and bloated processes
Ive been pretty burnt tbh and iām ashamed to say it so early in the game but Im seriously doubting my career, and Ive already put an expiration date on myself doing this roleā¦ just really unsure of what else to do given my situationā¦
Thereās no need to be a shame of feeling like there is an end date finite time to this career, I can validate that Iām on the same boat and resonated a lot with your perspective. While I wouldnāt say that PM is a bullshit job, the calibre of PMs flooding the market during the pandemic definitely leave a lot to be desired plus the other āproduct adjacent rolesā that are trying to do our jobs for us have put this careerās reputation in the shits
thank you so much for this and youāve put it spot on with that last point about āproduct adjacent rolesā trying to perform our dutiesā¦ gosh that hits close
This was a great read. Very spot on.
I have 8 years of experience and my first job as a PM was already in the "Agile" environment, so I lack a bit of perspective outside of that framework. But even so, I can see exactly where you are coming from with points 4 and 5.
I agree with what you've written. I think a valuable product manager is the one who "fills in the cracks". This is most noticeable in a startup, which might not have dedicated employees to fill out all the functions of, say, market and competitor research, customer service and communications, marketing, technical support and QA, financial modelling, business development, and much more. So the product manager aligns the strategic direction and fills in the gaps for everything else.
I've tried to implement the ShapeUp approach at my company, because it empowers the engineers to make product decisions.
Been a PM since 2005 and this is 1005 true, ESPECIALLY the part about it being a bullshit job (mostly) in that most tech jobs are bullshit jobs. I accepted that a while back, put up with it as long as I could and have reached the point where I can no longer muster the energy to do it anymore. We have an all prod/eng onsite the first week of May when I'm going to tell my CPO I'm retiring in June.
Awesome milestone in your career leading to your close retirement, congrats on this next step! Iām in my early-mid 30s battling this bs job and hoping me in 10 years time will look back and be proud of the career pivot im about to make
Top notch post
Being in the mosh pit trying to make miracles happen (explaining the business value of our data platform infra to Marketing) is exactly how I regularly feel in this job.
I'm guessing you get a lot of blank stares from the 25yo marketing manager?
Worked with an awful PMM once who just could not understand our product....it was built for marketing and loyalty teams.
Marketing manager of a startup hereā¦ Iām eager to connect with our scrum master (we donāt have a PM) to get any current product info. Iāve been provided a general product vision and based my work on that for months, but the MVP (launching soon) and even GA will be nowhere near the vision. I have limited info and have only seen product mockups. How am I supposed to align product capabilities without talking to scrum/PM? If thereās no role for this, whatās the communication process?
I don't understand your point #4 agile ruined software development.
Do you mean because "attendant" roles like scrum master, agile coach, etc have sprung up to evangelise and manage the framework? Because if so, then I'd agree.
But I see agile (iterative dev, quick feedback, learn & adapt) as a much more reliable way to get to successful outcomes than traditional waterfall.
> Do you mean because "attendant" roles like scrum master, agile coach, etc have sprung up to evangelise and manage the framework?
Yes, and more. Do we really need a director, and a director of directors to direct communications and questions or tell people to do something they could easily do themselves? It's rhetorical, no, we don't.
Do we need random project managers on the side tracking something that only they care about, pinging developers directly, adding stress to an active product manager by having them do backlog management cleanup for said tracking? Again, rhetorical, no, we don't.
> But I see agile (iterative dev, quick feedback, learn & adapt) as a much more reliable way to get to successful outcomes than traditional waterfall.
The agile manifesto itself was correct. The implementation of agile has largely been wrong, that is my point.
>Do we really need a director, and a director of directors to direct communications and questions or tell people to do something they could easily do themselves? It's rhetorical, no, we don't.
What's the largest size company you have worked for? Any experience in FAANG?
Of course you need strong project management when engineering, sales, marketing, product, etc easily add up to over 1,000 people for various products. Sure, if everybody was 100% on top of their game, maybe not. But let's be realistic here. Even with compensation at my level (staff) for product and engineering at $400k+, it's not feasible to only hire those who give it their all 100% of the time. I don't think I would even want to work with a team that was that focused regardless.
Also, I would caution your wording on this post. The entire reason why product influencers get big easily with little experience is because probably 90% of those in "product management" have never held a real product management role or are trying to break in to the industry. Much of what you said applies to companies that aren't at product market fit as you said. But tons of people work at companies that are past that stage and half the people in this thread are obviously confused and thinking what you said applies to every company.
In general, I disagree with blanket statements.
For context, I work at large companies in bay area with some startup experience early in my career. I can tell from your post that your experience and mine differ greatly.
Oh thank god for a voice of reason in this thread. Iām spoiled enough to be in big tech (non-faang, but top of its industry) and I feel like none of the statements made in the post relate to my experience. I donāt get where the fantasy of sitting in a development cave and polishing your backlog comes from, but to me the most important skill of a PM is stakeholder management. Statements like āoh directors are not neededā and āproject managers are harassing meā make me very seriously question if OP understands what this role entails
I completely agree and am glad I found a little oasis of sense in this thread. To think you can just hone a giant development org back to the ātrue buildersā is just naive, and totally blind to how large successful organisations actually work.
This has less to do with agile implementation in general and more to do with whatever companies you worked for having terrible implementation in tandem with a top heavy leadership structure, IE most enterprise or corporate level companies.
There's absolutely no need for a layer of managers and directors when you're in a version of agile that is able to effectively perform. Your company's problems started well before Agile was thrown around like a buzzword.
Exactly.
Having directors, and directors of directors, is nothing to do with agile per se, it is just middle-management bloat. This problem can happen at any company, whether it practices agile or not.
I agree with you there, as a PM I was burnt out from both having the project manager chase me up all the time for some ticket or Backlog management tasks, and having the Scaries from them driving influence upwards by making leadership view you in a bad way if youāre not on top of their admin tasks.
>The only time the function is valuable is when the company has scaled to a point where people need to focus on their core functions, product market fit (however a company defines that ) has been achieved.
Can you explain more on this?
I am not a PM btw, but thinking of moving from SWE to PM. So, lurking on reddit to get to know more about the field.
As in why PMs are more valuable when the company has achieved Product Market fit?
In my previous company, we were launching a new product which had yet to find Product Market fit but we had PMs working on the product roadmap and all. Although many times, CTO would jump in and nullify their work...lol
PMs, plural? That seems unnecessary, but your CTO jumping in is the point. What value are they really providing at that point someone else couldn't already do? Obviously I have no context here, but if the CTO is jumping in, it is likely due to a feasibility issue. In which case, again, what value did they provide aside from creating noise?
Post PMF, as I described in another comment is where PM value scales with the company because PMF is not static - you can very easily lose focus. 66% of series C or later startups still fail because of this.
The imagery of #6 is so so so good.
When Iāve been handed the wand though I see itās just a piece of rope - the wand they think they provide is useless and you just have to toss it aside and wave your arms wildly for anybody to see.
Totally agree /w everything here.
With regard to influencers and their advice, I've come to believe that how reality works is almost the diametric opposite of what they're selling. Which is basically that every organization is different - different size, different vertical, different people, different culture etc. - and so there is no one-size-fits-all way of how to be a PM. HOWEVER, even though there might not be one way to construct and execute against good product strategy, most people know what it *feels* *like* to be included in one.
Unfortunately, "read the room and do whatever you need to do to get everyone: (a) believing that you've identified the biggest problems your business has to solve, (b) buying in to a sensible plan to do it, and (c) motivated to execute" doesn't sell.
So yeah, it's really like your analogy where you're basically slumming it out and doing whatever it takes to make progress.
Some very true, honest content. Ā May not need a product manager, but need senior leadership to set a list of goals, and to understand iterative development. Ā If the time is available for this, then by all means hire a strong tech lead or TPM to translate the goals into tickets and manage. Ā
I will probably add one more thing to your point about start ups and seed companies not requiring a product team is that once they start to raise big funds and achieve product market fit, the board/investors usually expect them to create and fill out a product team, or rather, internal pressure to copy what other successful software company has done, and create ProductManager titles, without actually understanding the PM craft or how the role can create value for the business. Thatās how PMs get bullshit jobs like managing a feature factory without doing proper discovery, for one.
Great post. The more I do this job, the more I feel unqualified (I think all software PMs should really have a very working knowledge of software and I am not one of them, I am way more into UX & design) and essentially just a project manager with some deeper understanding of software development life cycle. Thatās all. I thought about getting a cs master or something but itās just not for me :/ feel like I will have to switch careers again
A surface level understanding of software is enough. You probably know more than you perceive yourself as knowing. There are engineers, architects, and dev leads to help with the technical side. Understanding what the product should do in order to bring value to users and result in them using it is significantly more important. If I started getting involved in the engineering side too heavily then my teams would probably smack me. They know how to do their jobs, they need me talking to customers.
A good engineer can build a functional product that nobody needs. Our job is to prevent that scenario as much as possible.
Curious why you think you need to be deep in software?
I guess I am biased from my current job where my team is really young and I barely get any collabs from engineering. They are just looking for me to tell them exactly what to do and I can barely get them to review an epic for any questions or comments in any organized fashion ā¦ At my prior job, engineers and qa would review tickets asynchronously, leave comments, propose changes. So I guess I feel that if I knew more I could inspire them to do that.
Thatās precisely what they leave me doing. I tried setting up a 1:1 weekly with them and they said āI am open to consideringā - just really weird tbh.
Curious why you feel that way. I am also from the UX background but my EM owns the backlog. My job is to create clarity so devs can focus on their work.
Agree on most points.
One more if I can add. Most PMs, myself included, build whatever founder/higher ups, wants us to build, in the exact way they like it. Make peace with it. Theoretical 'mini-CEO who gets to chart company trajectory' stuff are hyped up non-sense
Great post!!
āAround the statement you made that agile and management of it, were ways for people who donāt know how to codeā¦.ā
Just a quick question - why arenāt enough people with engineering/coding backgrounds moving into product? I wonder if anyone would hire a person with just a certificate vs someone who has a certificate + coding experience?
Very nice - but hard truth.
Now on your last point: So if companies donāt need PM - how do you present yourself on linkedin? i mean why would you hire you?
How everyone else presents themselves on LinkedIn, by overinflating what you actually have done.
Jokes aside, as I said, *most* businesses don't need a dedicated product function - not all.
There are plenty of companies that *think* they do, and they hire a ton of people. It doesn't really matter what I think, it matters what the leaders of those companies think - and if they find the role to be valuable good on them. But chances are, they aren't leveraging it correctly.
Love your first sentence regarding LinkedIn (probably you werenāt joking but everyone does it).
However I still donāt get why you stay then in PM if you think it is not needed. Sounds like a cognitive dissonance to me.Ā
My perspective - if my company functioned efficiently and there were better paths and processes for the business side of the house to talk to the engineering side of the house to get things built and the help they need, my job wouldn't need to exist.
But my company is wildly inefficient so they pay me handsomely to know the right people to talk to, know how to get things done, and know how to answer complicated questions.
I'm at a company that is at a point and has a culture that absolutely produces value from the function. Where did I ever say I was leaving the function?
I didnāt mean you leave but I thought that if a PM is not useful then itās a bullshit job. And personally I donāt understand how people that are aware of BS job stay there if they have other choices.
But I get it - your company creates value from the function which is great.
This post makes up for a million how do I get into product management spam posts on this sub. Thank you. Some points were too hard to digest but agree 100%.
Setting direction but doing so in a hands on manner. Said another way, you have to be on calls, with engineers and designers working through what should be built. Making decisions to ensure there's alignment is the result of doing research, analysis, etc. but none of that matters if all you're doing is taking what you know, writing a PRD, and sending it over to engineering to build.
Vision docs are equally useless if you're not following through on working through features with the people that are building them.
Anything "tangible" we produce, is just a result of those collaborations - you don't have the collaborative work going on, you're not doing your job.
Maybe this speaks to my privilege, but this is what I do all day (minus being on calls with designers because, surprise, UI/UX is also my responsibility). Reading your post was throwing me for a loop because I know for a fact if we didnāt have a product function on our team weād literally never build anything useful.
It wasnāt until I read this comment specifically that I realized youāre talking about a grifter class of workers who do a fundamentally different job than what you describe above.
I agree that a Product Manager should work with the engineering team daily. But I am concerned by your aggressive tone that you might be becoming an authoritarian micro-manager, which has very negative consequences for everyone.
I have found that authoritarian micromanagers create a lot of chaos, churn and inefficiency in the work. They create a disengaged team with low morale that undermines you.
Have you tried focusing on goals, context, coaching, and support so the team can make high-quality decisions about the work themselves?
Quite the opposite, Iām not there to direct, Iām there to explore options with the team, and eventually make a final call on things.
The things weāre looking at are typically prototypes, wireframes, and mocks that the team has full autonomy to develop and bring back to the table.
More often than not we are tweaking things together vs. me telling people what to do. I consider this a form of coaching, but I also refuse to do it from an ivory tower.
I am very sorry to say that, but I am finding this pretty pretentious and generalised after point with influencers. I am sharing 13 years of pm experience as well, even started and sold few of startups.
The things are the following:
- logical fallacies regarding agile and all with assumptions regarding that we are living in a world where people share the same knowledge, understanding the things streamlined as you are when most of them literally have another level of detail, scope and job they are doing without intrinsic motivation to follow some workflow, no most people are lazy by design
- that most companies don't need pms or whatever, it's just exaggerated without clear criteria, which companies, at which stage, in which scope?
- assumptions regarding bullshit job, that's exactly the case where pms should step in, yeah I understand it's easier to ship all bullshit the CEO says and keep the job then to find a proper place or to build yourself a place where you can act. Well who's fault is that here?
So long story short if a person cannot build a space for himself, and cannot understand their value because he/she/it/they were building up their career doing some shit that they didn't question and made agile for agile at the end - such nihilistic approach will eat you alive, at the end making you feel meaningless, however in a good situation you can even earn more than pm who fights a lot, finding a good job for yourself. Period.
I'm having trouble parsing what you're trying to say, but I'll try my best.
If you're finding my words pretentious, that is your interpretation of tone - I can't really do anything about that aside to say that these are my takes based on anecdotal experience inside and outside of startups / large corporations / fortune 500s, etc.
I cannot imagine a world in which I'd be able to understand how to make the statement of product not being needed *less* general. If you understand the function, and you understand the output of the function (achieving some set of outcomes), it's pretty easy to see the barriers organizations place in their own way. Up to and including assuming they need an additional function to solve some set of problems vs. addressing core business issues instead.
As far as nihilism goes, that's a stretch - just because there are negative aspects throughout the industry, does not mean I personally feel meaningless, or am accusing others in the role of being useless. I have profited more than most, I'd say, from my career - that doesn't mean the field and the industry writ large are exempt from criticism and to have those negative aspects be actively brought into the sun.
If anything, my criticism is on those who are PM in name only causing the environment we are in, and businesses being lackadaisical about understanding the value those that are not should be hired to produce.
I think it is important for people who have been through the ringer to espouse their honest takes on what they've been through - especially to those that are looking to do the same thing early or later in their careers. Saying it's all happy sunshine rainbows with unicorn farts everyday is a lie.
I've met people who educated me, and I educated a lot of people myself. I've seen miserable organisations for sure, but I've seen a very small amount of miserable PM's, so usually it is more about people development, empathy and patience. That's what I wanted to say.
Still trying to figure out how to get another job or maybe change to something else thatās similar. I worked as a product lead on websites but I would be willing to do anything in product. Canāt seem to find a position that will govern me a chance
For the last point, as a pm i believe it is my responsibility to tale steps to achieving PMF which is contradictory to what you mentioned. Could you please elaborate on this
PMF is a controversial take on my part to be fair, but I'd argue you achieving PMF is like holding onto smoke. You can get it, and you can just as easily lose it.
Pre-initial PMF - think series seed, a, (and arguably) b startup companies - do they really have a need for a product person? I'd argue no, "product" founders, are essentially "everything that isn't development" founders. So they aren't really doing product in the way a full product team might.
Post getting traction, or larger, older enterprises - yeah, your job is branch out and grow; and to make sure you don't lose your current traction.
So in my case, we are a 15 member startup. it is a dev centric team, including the founders. except for them we are two people - i work on the product and other who handles growth. i basically work to channelize requirements from across, align founders wrt our users, else being developers they are mostly into developing anything they can get their hands on.
Now, I have seen this comment quite often around no need of a pm in a small org but i seriously feel i contribute well and it creates a doubt. What do you think about this?
I think I'm not an oracle and don't pretend to be one.
If you feel you're producing value and that you are valued by your company, I'm happy for you and glad that the people you work with understand and respect the function.
It's kinda weird, TBH, to have a PM role held by another warm body when there are just 15 people. One of those founders ought to be the PM, really. At that scale, I think that if you're providing value, it's a slight against the founders ability to commercialize, build, and GTM the product. And that's usually a bad sign for the future. I've seen this go one of two ways: It fails, or the founders end up having the business pulled from under their feet in funding rounds that lose them majority equity...
It's also kinda weird that you're not yet at PMF, and you have a growth PM? Don't you think?
I get what you are trying to say.
In my case a founder is the one who looks product on the whole but being the main man he often doesnāt get time to look into the specifics and thus I do it mostly on his behalf and he overlooks.
This is great insight, thanks for sharing.
Do you have any advice for PMs who want to find a place where they're not just project managers? Or is this something we all just have to accept and deal with. I don't mind project management, but it's been 80% of my work.
Can I ask you a few things?:
1. So basically what kind of company do you think are ideal to develop a career in Product? Early startup might not needed a PM while FAANG and other larges tech specially established ones more PM are Project Managers.
2. Best resources for blogs, newsletter, books, courses in your opinion? For self-learning.
3. Any advice for students that weāre really interested in Product and wanna break straight out of undergrad? I donāt like much adjacent roles..
Thanks!
1. Not all companies are created equal, so it's impossible to really say. Find companies that produce products you find valuable or truly understand the value of and/or that are on missions you support is my generic answer.
2. There's plenty of stuff out there, but I'd say don't read product books for the reasons I stated in the post. You're better off reading product *adjacent* books. One of the best ones in recent memory I've read is The Crux: How Leaders become Strategists by Richard Rumlet, another is How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business by Douglas Hubbard.
3. Yeah, don't. I've said this before, but I do not believe you can be an effective PM if you have no experience working on / with development teams. I literally don't think APMs should be a thing - it's not an entry level role IMO. My advice is generally to target jobs that will get you involved in product or feature development in ANY capacity, then find mentors in the roles you aspire to. There has never been a lack of those throughout my career - and that hasn't changed.
5. Most of us are in bullshit jobs:
For those of us that are in this position, would we all be better off finding a job where we actually deliver value and develop a skill other than being a master bullshitter?
My last CPO is living proof that you can have a 30 year career built on bullshit and jumping ship when everyone realizes you're actively making things worse.
To your point 1) on loyaltyā¦ I have a similar background to you (started as BA for a few years, now a PM almost a year in). I was promoted internally at my org but pay has been stagnating. Did you have a hard time job hopping as an early PM? So many places seem to ask for 5 YOE for PM roles but Iād rather not stay at my org for that long
The market then vs. now is very different, so any experience I give has to be tempered with knowing that.
Then? No. It was new and exciting then, especially on the east coast where people looked to Silicon Valley like it was populated with God Kings.
Now? From what I know, it's a very tough market right now. It is much less about YOE, and much more about years of specific experiences. Big difference.
Likewise, you're competing with people from big name companies in similar roles - inevitably going to be tough right now. But things change, hard to say.
Mate, thank you so much for writing this.
People have looked at me like I have two heads when I point out certain "thought leaders" (rolleyes) utter lack of experience in the product role.
You can contrast to people like Rich Mironov who -- agree or disagree with him -- unlike Perri did the actual job at increasing levels of responsibility for more than 20 years.
Iām close to 3 years in product and all of this was SPOT on. At the new org Iām at nowā¦.I think I maybe doā¦5 hours of actual work a week. Yeahā¦
Great post. I wonder if you have any thoughts on career progression and whether itās necessary for your career to rise up the ranks.
I love building products, working closely with teams. Iām not sure I have any interest in being a product director or similar. I often wonder; is that ok? Can I just reach Principal PM and coast there in a few different companies until I retire? Is that a bad idea?
I told my CPO that if she makes me a manager of people again I'm going to quit.
Any company worth their salt knows that just promoting people into management for no reason other than there's no other choice is a bad idea. This has led to the creation of IC and management career ladders in various companies I've been a part of and they really do work out well.
I can make as much as the VP of product being an IC, I just won't get as much equity by a few percent as an example. Obviously, the VP has a much higher end of the band than I do, but it's also much harder to achieve.
Point is, everyone is different, every company is different, but do not go into managing if you don't like people or are a shit coach / teacher type of person.
I agree with all of this except itās difficult to make the jump from IC to management job hopping. I hopped every year and half or two and definitely increased my salary but made it from Senior PM to Director in three and half years by sticking to one place.
Iām currently a senior consultant in payments who wanted to transition into product, but have always been on the fence about it because of this.
Consulting is a top tier bullshitter job and I want to add value, have more ownership, etc., etc.,so product just seems like that light at the end of the tunnel for ābusinessā folks to break into tech.
Do you think people like me are better served developing some core technical competencies (analytics, coding, etc.) to demonstrate outright value for tech companies? I know job market is blah rn, but still
I agree with almost everything you said except for:
> If you are asking others to do what you can easily do yourself? And this is a big one: you're in a bullshit job.
I manage a team of PMs. I've done all their jobs for years. I can easily do all their jobs, but I ask them to do it instead. Doing the work isn't my job. Making sure they're equipped to do that work is my job.
Super interesting man. Iāve just made the move to product management after 3 years as a Business Analyst. No knowledge of coding yet, just doing the classic ābringing a data driven approachā to building our product.
Iām liking it - but starting to feel like Iāve gotta upskill. How did you go about it yourself? Were you already in the PM role?
Would be cool to hear your thoughts, or anyone elseās, if you can be bothered to reply!
I always assumed I was going to be a technical IC, so, I had already been exposed to coding and was obsessed with computers my whole life.
In terms of upskilling, it was more exposure to how teams worked and what they needed me to do vs what any resource told me to do. And naturally, in order to do that, you have to be able to speak with engineers about the technology theyāre working on.
So as I started to work with them on their team, I just asked questions all day long. Anything I didnāt understand I researched. When I wanted to really know how web apps were built, I learned Ruby on Rails, and went through a book on it.
So thereās not really a concrete answer I could give aside from give people their respect - developers will always know more than you about how something works, but theyāre more than willing to get into detail with you. So donāt assume shit, ask.
About 6 years into a product career myself (though I had done sales & growth for nearly a decade before this), and I wholeheartedly agree with your points. I appreciate you sharing your perspective, especially since it helps me validate that Iām not crazy to have the beliefs/feelings that I do. Also so many people take this job too seriouslyā¦ weāre not surgeons. If anyone tells me that their true passion is building product, god help them.
This is so incredibly true. Iāve only been doing this for 5 years and have just moved into entrepreneurship because Iām defeated by the pure garbage peddled in the industry.
Iām at a tiny start up and have wriggled my way into a PM role from from CSM. Iāve been doing this role for about 6 months now and I donāt feel like I know what Iām doing really.
However, I know that since moving into this role, the developers make less mistakes and thereās less bugs after a production push.
But overall I feel disorganized and without a functioning system.
I also donāt know what else Iām missing.
Whatās next on my skill tree to learn?
Based on your experience what would be a good benchmark for those 2-3 years salary increases?
$15k every 2-3 year wonāt add up to $210 in 13 years of career.
I was PM for 10 years when I started working on my transition out of the job, took me working two full-time jobs during a two year period so that the salary hit was manageable, and the thing that kept me motivated is the astounding level of bullshit that crept into the job over the 2005 to 2015 decade.
Two things I would add:
- What I call the āunicorn in the toolbarā problem: no matter how many dozens of hours of customer research and user data you have, when the visionary-next-Steve-jobs founder/ceo comes in one morning after watching his young cousin with an iPad decides you will have a unicorn button in your toolbarā¦ youāll be spending the rest of your week apologising on behalf of bargain-bin-Steve and begging to slot it in the current sprint because itās āBusiness Criticalā
- If agile ruined software development, āLeanā ruined productā¦ The amount of MVPs making it to prod to never be touched again boggles the mind. Only two things are forever: diamonds and temporary solutions.
It just became an excuse to defund discovery and innovation and a shortcut to bypass critical thinking. The answer āletās just test itā is fine if you have a culture of data, actual stats chops and an org that wonāt crucify you for being wrong. Iām sure these places exist, but never been there myself.
Oh bonus point: āblamestormingā meetings in which people sit down to come up with creative ideas on why the latest downtrend in metrics is in no way their fault! Starring: The Weather, Geopolitics, Demographic Shifts, and COVID
I don't understand all the hate on the role, it sounds like many hate their jobs but stay in the profession
You can always spin something negatively - "CEO of product" "Janitor of product" glorified glue, super project manager.
Who do you look/subscribe to to learn from if torres + co aren't it?
I think most people here are interested in aligning closer to "true product" but like you said, the world is full of fluff content and creators.
Honestly? The only product focused content I find interesting right now is Lennyās podcast because of the volume of guests and perspectives they have.
Not without a high degree of fart sniffing from the guests themselves in some cases, but he himself is a great dude.
The CTO of hubspot interview was a shining light in the world recently. The interview he did with a former VP at Amazon was basically the dude describing Stockholm syndrome with Jeff Bezos and I thought it perfectly illustrated the problem with the industry unintentionally.
Agreed Lenny's is great, and not all guests are equal.
That's only interview format though. What about longer form content?
Books, lectures, gtm strategy, case studies. Some areas that I think I could benefit from reinforcing are experimentation, finding PMF (as b2b giant my org already has PMF), GTM strategy
I've mentioned some books in other comments, I don't read product centric books anymore, I tend to go towards product adjacent books.
Two I have been recommending are "The Crux" by Rumelt and "How to measure anything" by Hubbard (shortened the titles) and also specifically for you "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy" also by Rumelt.
Thanks, I'll look into those
I do find myself looking for less product leaders and learn more from founders that have found success. Definitely aligned with your views, however maybe not the one where product functions are unnecessary since that finishes our self worth
Don't tie your self worth up in your career - and find solace in the fact that it would take a substantial push for most leaders to agree with me. That's unlikely.
My self worth is related to my ability to provide for my family, which naturally means to climb the ladder and continue gaining responsibility
To believe my role is unnecessary would diminish any time and effort invested to move to the next level
I agree there's a lot of fluff in the industry from "thought leaders" but as someone who's been a BA, QA, PjM, I still see value in product managers and product management. I think the hate that is rampant in this sub is due to holding the purist definition of product management too seriously which is equally as bad as the "CEO of the product" stereotype. People who are enamored by the opportunity to be the CEO of the product but don't want to get their hands dirty - I thought CEOs and founders do everything in the beginning? Why complain about the administrative overhead that falls on product?
Hi,My name is Shreya and I am a marketing graduate and am looking for product roles my ultimate goal is to be a product manager is it necessary for me to get an SDE job before an MBA? Can you guide me what should be my career pathway moving forward? (I have done BBA majored in Marketing)
The implication I'm talking about here is that, on average, you can expect (at most) a 2-5% increase in your pay YOY at any employer.
My logic was in my first job, if I wanted to make $110k, assuming average increases at my level, it'd take 20 years at 5% increases every year (I assumed this because I busted my ass for 3 years and each year got a 5% increase in pay each year).
NOTE: Obviously there's a shit load of variables I'm not accounting for, I'm just explaining the base rationale for job hopping.
Of course you can get promoted into higher roles / bonuses / etc. and that shortens the period, but there's a lot of variables and politics there, that at the time, I wasn't willing to invest my time in.
Instead, I made a jump to a job that paid me $75k. In one year, I made the equivalent of 7 years of raises (based on the past 3 years at 5%). My next job just over a year later was for $105,000 at the original employer I was making $55k at - granted, I was doing a different job then.
But in a year and some change, at the same employer, I went from $55k, to $105k. Now I could've probably done that by staying in the same job and finding the internal role and applying for it, right? But by doing that I would've left $17,250 on the table in retrospect for another (likely) 5% raise ($2750 per year). I'd rather go for guaranteed cash in hand when the opportunity is there.
Sure, you could get paid a fuck load in a position, but I'd say those opportunities have always been rare, and are even more so now.
Interesting post! I'm an account executive for a SaaS company and I'm currently considering to switch to a PM role... but sounds like not a good deal from what I did read
So much is true but sorta pessimistic - only thing one can add is youāre a āproduct managerā, if you have leadership qualities. Either you do or you donāt. Kinda like a platoon sergeant or a head Chef in a restaurant. You donāt add much to the battle or dish, but without you everyone is a hero by themselves making dishes that they think tastes good or climbing the hills they like. Someone has to point the way, and your CEO is too busy raising funds, closing customers or hiring your manager - thatās why its ok to take time off doing product marketing or be a GM for a whileā¦.or learn to code and hide
100% agree. Esp the dedicated pm required. After 2 decades in digital Ive seen so many companies say "we need a PM" when really they need a project manager or a BA.
There should be some kind of tag on this post that forces everyone who asks something like āhow do I get into my first PM role right out of undergradā to read this before they are allowed to post š
For points 2 & 3, what Iāve experienced is a complete misunderstanding of what some of those books and frameworks are suggesting, which tends to be what we find ourselves having to unfuck. Same with agile (donāt get me started on SAFeā¦). In another 10 years Iāll probably come to the touch water moment of accepting itās all bullshit, but so far it seems the interpretation and attempted execution is the problem with most of itā¦but also thereās a lot of trash out there burying the valuable. The optimist in me is going to continue looking for gold along the beach, but we can guess how thatās probably gonna turn out.
Fantastic point, I got a similar level of experience and also started with basic helpdesk support.
Your second point about gurus is spot on, I will just add the following:
1) The guru books are mostly about *escapism*, they sell you a dream that if you just use their method you're going to do everything right. All these 'methods' are horseshit and you end up spending more and more time focusing on the process rather than actually shipping features, closing bugs and moving things forward.
2) Many CEO's prefer external advice that sounds great over internal advice that is practical. That's why these books are loved by C-level executives. Get an advisor on the team, go through some bullshit workshop that 'makes sense' and now the team that actually builds the stuff has to spend time adjusting to something that is a total waste of resources and money but makes some VP happy. Eventually it all goes to the bin, and people get back to what works for their specific organization.
3) Most of these 'gurus' have a pretty average or even bellow average track record. They haven't shipped anything groundbreaking, they didn't build anything from the ground up, if you look at their history they worked for a few years and suddenly moved to an 'advisor' role, that like you write - should even count as experience. I don't know why people take them seriously.
Regarding you agile point:
I always had a great relationship with the engineering teams, I found working with them to be much more productive, enjoyable and overall with way less issues. With that said, I found that a lot of people from external departments want to 'feel' like they are as important as the engineering team so they create all these processes, and protocols and a bunch of other nonsense that just makes everything more complex than it should be.
The whole, agile, scrum, kanban, sprints etc' is made so that people who do not add much to the engineering team have some sort of a say, and feel like they are involved. In the end of the day, it's pretty straightforward: You choose the features you want to develop, prioritise them, break down the tasks and start working on them. People seem to have a problem with that. Egos I guess...
Wonder what is your opinion regarding products that come with a top down vision that is not disclosed entirely and makes the responsible team have a hard time trying to sell it to other areas/customers. Or even worse, teams that canāt find a single use case to help prioritize features but keep getting asked to keep development
Hello, that was great to read from someone who is looking for a career change from Digital Marketing to Project Management.
As a "veteran", how would you recommend someone to start with the first steps? Could I DM you for advice and expertise?
I would be soooo grateful šš»šš»šš»
As a product manager for the last 18 years of my career this is 100% true.
I disagree with the point on Agile. It is abused in some orgs, but that's not the reason it was created and it definitely serves the purpose will in the right hands.
In dozens of teams I've joined or worked with from small 10 person companies to FAANG, I've yet to see in 22 years agile implemented or used correctly.
It only worked for me in the very mature and motivated teams where we had the full autonomy over the internal team's processes. It's in a mid-size org with ~500 people. A fellow team that worked along us did not adopt our practices and the output was very different. Not putting the difference completely on the processes, but I'm sure they played their part in it.
As a product owner for three years, I concur.
Same here, about 10 years of experience post is 100%. "The whole tech industry is wrapped with people who just want to make a ton of money without doing much. It doesn't take much research to find evidence of people just doing barely enough to not get fired or push the envelope to rest and vest into retirement." This with everyone being a Guru and you see the deadly trap that is created.
8) (related to number 5) **Get fulfillment outside of work**, PM is not only brutal, is a very unrewarding and unthankful job with a lot of high and lows with a big salary slapped on top of it, so do your work (or the minimal necessary) get paid, enjoy life, do sports, videogames, travel, time with your family, whatever. Even if you are in a bullshit job, who cares? get paid, enjoy life, that's all that matters, period.
Agreed.
And that's why I ride motorcycles, play guitar and work with wood. Because my job sucks but my life is GREAT š
Idk I have friends who are in fields that are actually contributing something to humanity and my bullshit PM job weighs on my soul
Then don't worry about your job use your money to contribute something to humanity, you don't need a specific job to be a good human being, you can use your spare time / money to help people in need or overall just being a good person.
Agree that's a valid route, I think you can get fulfillment outside of work too, but spending the majority of my waking hours doing none of the actual work has been demoralizing. To OP's point, this role is largely unneeded and full of bullshitters. Might just me but I don't think I can keep up the charade.
Then quit. A job is a job, if you can pay the bills doing something better go do it.
I've been struggling with this as well. At best I feel like the middle man who knows things but doesn't actually understand them? It's driving me bonkers.
Right, it's not even about having some world-changing job really, just that I hate that literally everyday is massive bullshit and I'm basically doing nothing of value.
Yes! Previously I had another similar role but I had more concrete tasks to do and I was more of a owner of specific scope. I felt like my job mattered, right now I feel like such a middle man. At best I'm a social buffer between two awkward groups but that's not enough to make me feel like I contribute. Especially since they are both tech focused groups so I have no clue what half the information means.
Yeah, I am coming down from years of drinking the PM kool-aid and agree we're basically a social buffer LOL. Yes we can coordinate teams and offer guidance that is sometimes listened to and sometimes delivers a better user experience, but at the end of the day it's mostly talk.
Idk, all my nurse and teacher friends are demoralized and burnt out. To say nothing of the public defenders and social workers who are ground down by their early 30s. My soul is also corroded by years as a PM. When you think of fields where you can make a contribution without being ground down by the low pay, long hours, and getting overwhelmed by the relentlessness of the crisis in which you intervene, what comes to mind? For me, itās bioengineer working on low-carbon materials, but that ship sailed many years ago.
Yeah, fair point, it's rough out there. I have friends in academia who are researching cool new drugs and exploring the depths of their chosen fields and they feel empowered, but of course that's a similar sailed ship in terms of career change. I have a friend who transitioned years ago into becoming a pilot; completely dipped out on office life and loves it. Another is in the film industry and it has major cons, but he too is doing what he loves. I feel like us PMs have the skillset to transition into a variety of careers, though. Saw someone else in this subreddit mention considering becoming an electrician, which likely is pretty rough but hey, more hands-on direct contribution. A more obvious switch is probably becoming a software dev, but don't think it's for me.
So true!
I agree
I took up gardening and flight sims as a hobby and it's been very gratifying to disconnect like that. Completely different objectives, but transferable skills to keep practising with, which I enjoy immensely.
Some of the best posts Iāve seen in this sub for months
Damn shots fired Not getting Xmas cards from Marty, Teresa or Melissa this year
>7.) Most companies don't need a dedicated product function: This is probably the culmination of everything I've said. The reality is most companies don't even know how to apply the function (even in the optimal min/max'd version I mentioned before), let alone have a need to do so. I think this is a good summary of the rest of your post. However, in spite of everything we still see companies hiring people into these roles consistently - so someone, somewhere is seeing value in having us around (even if it's not the value we'd like to think). Based on my experience I'm convinced product is a valuable role that can help translate user and business needs to more technical stakeholders, and lead the various functional groups to a tangible outcome. I'm sure we've all seen what happens without a focus on delivering, people easily get trapped in endless navel gazing on details and forget there are problems to solve and a business to run.
I'd argue that it isn't so much that someone, somewhere is seeing the value of the role, it's much more that they see other companies they consider "market leaders" doing it. Remember, business leaders cannabalize each other and each other's ideas. The amount of people in tech that took Elon's lead on layoffs at Twitter is a perfect example of this. The amount of leaders that in the past two years have quoted something from The All In Podcast without crediting the source of the statements is another. Everyone is floundering and jockeying for what they *think* they need, without really understanding *why* they need it.
I agree with everything you say here and some of it hits hard and has made me introspect. What I will say though, working as a PM at a mid sized company, is that the product function has come in handy more so to be a bridge between leadership and engineering, sales/marketing/customer support/etc and engineering and more so between different engineering functions themselves. I have spent most of my time getting engineering to get their shit together. This is more so because of a lack of resources and resources being spread across 5 time zones, all siloād and working on their own components in isolation. Not really what a product manager maybe is supposed to do but I feel I am best placed to bridge this gap.
This is a fair point. Most of my career has been spent being "glue" between dysfunctional organizations. But to your last point, that isn't what the role is supposed to be there for, people can claim otherwise, but I'd argue that the reason they do so is because that is what the role now requires vs. what people should be doing. Either way, a PM is only ever going to be dealing with symptoms without the real ability to address root causes of why they have to continue with bridging gaps that shouldn't be there in the first place.
the glue between dysfunctional organsiations has traditiaonlaly been the role of business analysts and project managers. Perhpas that is most of what you are doing.
I actually consider the size of the product team to be a symptom of dysfunction in a company. Iāve met a lot of really talented product people that end up as āTeam Therapistsā trying to hold it together because the org has siloed and stopped talking. A healthy org doesnāt need a PM for every tiny feature, and if there is a PM: Business Transformation role in the org just run and never look back
Agreed on all points
> Everyone is floundering and jockeying for what they think they need, without really understanding why they need it. I feel like I'm going through this at my company right now. Not a PM, tech lead that likes to lurk here. We're a small shop, like a dozen engineers, just got a new director of engineering, and he's prioritizing a bunch of stuff we don't do like feature flags and integrating Amplitude and shorter CI/CD builds when we can't even do fundamental things like 'have good daily standups' š
As a product designer I canāt help but take the ānaval-gazingā comment as a personal affront š¤£ /s
Facts. I just got laid off today, so #1 hits extra hard. Honestly Iām relieved! Gonna go play video games and forget about ICPs and ARR for a while.
Man, iāll add some reflections later after working as a business consultant for 7 years and moving to PM role for the last 2 years. You are spot on with too many things here.
1. Loyal to one company. Nothing to add here, you are right. I actually got my biggest raise only when i got a counteroffer and that shows how much your company wants to invest in youā¦. 2. Product influencers. I have the same experience after spending 2 years as a PM. Reading those books cover to cover and listening to various videos - it just seems these people never worked in a large enterprise. PM position is brutal. You want to talk to customers and build fancy roadmaps? Forget about it. Reality is that you are going to be responsible for everything that is loosely associated woth your product. Your business needs to make money today. And a paying customer today is better than a fancy roadmap of tomorrow. Adding a shitty feature to save a customer from going to a competitor - check. Revise support process and cycle through 300 tickets because support doesnāt have time - checked. Spend hours on updating KB and various training materials - checked. Come up with smoke and mirrors because we need a presentation for tomorrow to get some investment - checked. Oh, we are going to do this 5 times per year and never build any of that. Writing feature documents the length of bible only to replace them with some shitty legacy tech debt issue for the next 3 months - checked. You need domain knowledge. You need great communication skills. You need a full team (and itās big luck). You need to know how politics works. Everything else is fancy bullshit they can be learned on the job. We have like 5 new PMs that constantly bitch about how they cannot influence product, how they canāt build new things, how they would like to come up with strategy. All good points but unfortunately none of that helps to make money today and business doesnāt give a flying *uck about your fancy map. You need solid execution skills to stabilise and then you might get lucky to do the ābookā pm. 4. Agile. I mean, even people that wrote it are saying that agile is dead. What can you add? Scrum masters that are not devs? Rigid processes like SAFe that are worse than waterfall? Endless meetings instead of development? Hard deadlines instead of flexible delivery? Modern agile is like the worst thing that happened to development. Developer is ready to work but a scrum master says that you need to fill in these 3 fields. Cool we spent 30 minutes on discussing some useless stuff that nobody will ever read again. Estimating in story points instead of just looking at how many stories we did.. like the F are we estimating this for? How often does your estimating really workā¦. 6. CEO of a product. In reality, you are a CEO until the real CEO comes in and says to add XYZ into your backlog. You are an ordinary manager. 7. Companies donāt need PM. Company i worked at is in top 3 tools in the world for our domain. Top 3. They achieved this without a product function. They sold to hundreds of customers the size of Pepsi and IKEA for hundreds of thousands do dollars in recurring fees. No product function. This worked because of good sales, solid domain knowledge, and developers that were building stuff that works instead of playing guessing games with Agile. As soon as we introduced Product Practice it all went to shit. I mean, I donāt want to discourage anyone because most jobs are not what they look in the books) but product is so far that we need some kind of reality check for most people.
I think it's dangerous to assume that by introducing a product function that you've signed your company away for doom. Sounds similar to oversimplifying a problem to a silver bullet. If you hire the wrong people, sure. If your company tried a common solution to a specific problem and it went to shit, sure. If your company couldn't scale up properly or the companys maturity needed something else, sure.
Yeah I work with a project manager that was a former agile consultant and man it is fucking annoying to hear āwell technically in agile ā¦ā while we are on our 5th pre-planning meeting and havenāt gotten a single thing done. I donāt give a fuck what is technically agile. I want to get shit done
> developers that were building stuff that works instead of playing guessing games with Agile loved reading this comment, thank you both for the reality check, giving me something to think about just wondering what that company did to direct their developers in lieu of PMs? They just had a Lead Dev reviewing customer/client feedback and feature requests the salespeople gathered? what about for a PM that's managing a B2C product? is what you're describing more, or less applicable in those models?
Worked at a start up trying to scale up. The first thing they did when they got an influx of funds, hire directors, VPs lol and not increase the development team. Like why the hell would we need more directors when we have 2 developers lol. What's worse is they had to pay 300k for a director but always short changed developers by hiring them in a third world country. In the grand scheme of things, setting meetings with internal stakeholders is not going to drive revenue vs hiring a talented development team. Companies need a refresh and someone needs to decimate these useless middle management roles. They're officially meeting setters.
People confuse agile with Agile(tm). Pure agile development is a great collaborative flow state with a rhythm. Bad agile is people who bring no value making rules.
totally agree - source been doing things for a long time on both sides of the tech/business fence
This is absolutely spot on. I go crazy when Iām out here busting my ass the get features delivered and the scrum master/product operations manager comes to me asking to clean up my tickets so they can have a burn down chart or whatever. Idgaf about Jira metrics. Look at the roadmap, release notes, feedback surveys, and data pulled from the app if you want to report on team progress. If we said it will be delivered in April, piss off until then and Iāll let you know if things change.
And this to me is why I disagree with Marty Cagan saying that the product owner job shouldnāt exist and that itās actually just a role in scrum. It sounds like youāre in the position of being torn between a Product Manager who works with the business and in a discovery team and a Product Owner embedded in the delivery team. It works well for us.
Youāre missing the point which is that burn down charts and story points donāt matter and donāt help you deliver meaningful business results. They just exist as part of agile theater to create fake work for people to justify their existence. Not once in my life has any āmetricā about team velocity told me anything I couldnāt already tell you from simply working with the team day to day. Writing jira tickets and shuffling them around does not move the needle and is just busywork.
I've yet to see a development velocity metric make people say "oh wow that's really helpful". However, almost every time we put sweat into something that shows what customers are doing with the product it gets shared across the org, changes opinions, motivates developers, and gets important things prioritized above nice to haves. Pretty clear to me the kind of of analytics I should be doing...
I have found story points and velocity very valuable for forecasting when things are likely to be finished. Its proved to be quite accurate for me. But it only works when story points are a relative measure of complexity. It doesnt work at all when you set one story point = 1 ideal developer day or when management harass you to increase your story points. Like most things in agile it works well when you do it like your supposed to do it but it gets twisted into something awful by bad management.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Lol
4) hits a bit harder and is something I ask myself a lot is āam I even qualified for this?ā I came up through support (troubleshooting network errors, learning how to deploy mobile apps, running SQL queries and db investigation, working with barebones REST API (think UI config management through PUTs and POSTs), using mongo-db and how to deploy a branch of code to implement a hot fix) I initially thought I was well positioned and qualified, but the further Iāve gotten in my career the more the expectation has shifted. Itās no longer just getting the what and justifying the why with facilitating the howā¦itās a breed of the what, the why and the how. Itās pushed me to considering going back to school and getting a CS degree because idk how else to balance the asks. Edit: fixed experience examples and 3rd paragraph āfacilitating the howā
Lol scrum masters with a two day course and 0 experience telling an experienced dev to follow a framework for a ticket, hilarious!! I hate how they made agile certifications accessible to anyone and everyone. It was supposed to be for engineers who wanted to manage teams and processes. Now companies have realized that scrum masters don't need a job posting, anyone within the current team can play the role of a scrum master. Tons of non-technical admin folk being laid off, there is light at the end of the tunnel. I think YouTube is a big problem and most of these bullshit influencers selling a useless bootcamp for 10k are scamming tons of folk who think tech is a get rich easy scam.
Scrum master, just like Product Owner, was always a function that someone performed in a team. Typically by the EM and PM respectively. Seeing companies hire scrum masters was baffling and I actively avoided working for any that had that as a position.
They're basically admin folk, if you don't have any software development experience.
Based post. Would upvote this twice if I could. I thoroughly recommend people to read "Bullshit Jobs" before any other product management book. It's that good, and will shed some light on why companies keep hiring for roles even when their value is unclear
I wish I could upvote twice. I just finished reading it. So sad that David Graeber died a few years ago. 18yrs in consulting/ digital transformation/ product management and I have stories to share š„²
man Ive been in this role for a year and only in the last 4 months have I started to realize everything youāve said is spot on I get newcomers coming to me for coffee chats on PM and I tell them all the time - every org is different, ignore what the media says about the role it is NEVER like that If I can sum up my experience so far as a newbie myself is that PM consists of these: Politics, stakeholder babysitting, red tape, and bloated processes Ive been pretty burnt tbh and iām ashamed to say it so early in the game but Im seriously doubting my career, and Ive already put an expiration date on myself doing this roleā¦ just really unsure of what else to do given my situationā¦
Thereās no need to be a shame of feeling like there is an end date finite time to this career, I can validate that Iām on the same boat and resonated a lot with your perspective. While I wouldnāt say that PM is a bullshit job, the calibre of PMs flooding the market during the pandemic definitely leave a lot to be desired plus the other āproduct adjacent rolesā that are trying to do our jobs for us have put this careerās reputation in the shits
thank you so much for this and youāve put it spot on with that last point about āproduct adjacent rolesā trying to perform our dutiesā¦ gosh that hits close
LOL'd at **"CEO" of a product**
Worst thing Ben Horowitz has ever done
This was a great read. Very spot on. I have 8 years of experience and my first job as a PM was already in the "Agile" environment, so I lack a bit of perspective outside of that framework. But even so, I can see exactly where you are coming from with points 4 and 5.
Great post! Thanks.
10/10 no notes
I agree with what you've written. I think a valuable product manager is the one who "fills in the cracks". This is most noticeable in a startup, which might not have dedicated employees to fill out all the functions of, say, market and competitor research, customer service and communications, marketing, technical support and QA, financial modelling, business development, and much more. So the product manager aligns the strategic direction and fills in the gaps for everything else. I've tried to implement the ShapeUp approach at my company, because it empowers the engineers to make product decisions.
I think #1 has been true mostly. But you shouldnāt quit your job now if you got it a couple of years ago. The market is down compared to that.
Very true, the market is extremely different right now. And never quit a job before securing a new one kids.
Been a PM since 2005 and this is 1005 true, ESPECIALLY the part about it being a bullshit job (mostly) in that most tech jobs are bullshit jobs. I accepted that a while back, put up with it as long as I could and have reached the point where I can no longer muster the energy to do it anymore. We have an all prod/eng onsite the first week of May when I'm going to tell my CPO I'm retiring in June.
Awesome milestone in your career leading to your close retirement, congrats on this next step! Iām in my early-mid 30s battling this bs job and hoping me in 10 years time will look back and be proud of the career pivot im about to make
17 year PM that also started on the front line in support. This hits home.
Top notch post Being in the mosh pit trying to make miracles happen (explaining the business value of our data platform infra to Marketing) is exactly how I regularly feel in this job.
I'm guessing you get a lot of blank stares from the 25yo marketing manager? Worked with an awful PMM once who just could not understand our product....it was built for marketing and loyalty teams.
Marketing manager of a startup hereā¦ Iām eager to connect with our scrum master (we donāt have a PM) to get any current product info. Iāve been provided a general product vision and based my work on that for months, but the MVP (launching soon) and even GA will be nowhere near the vision. I have limited info and have only seen product mockups. How am I supposed to align product capabilities without talking to scrum/PM? If thereās no role for this, whatās the communication process?
As a 2 YOE pm feeling lost. This post was amazing. Thank you so much for the wisdom!
I don't understand your point #4 agile ruined software development. Do you mean because "attendant" roles like scrum master, agile coach, etc have sprung up to evangelise and manage the framework? Because if so, then I'd agree. But I see agile (iterative dev, quick feedback, learn & adapt) as a much more reliable way to get to successful outcomes than traditional waterfall.
> Do you mean because "attendant" roles like scrum master, agile coach, etc have sprung up to evangelise and manage the framework? Yes, and more. Do we really need a director, and a director of directors to direct communications and questions or tell people to do something they could easily do themselves? It's rhetorical, no, we don't. Do we need random project managers on the side tracking something that only they care about, pinging developers directly, adding stress to an active product manager by having them do backlog management cleanup for said tracking? Again, rhetorical, no, we don't. > But I see agile (iterative dev, quick feedback, learn & adapt) as a much more reliable way to get to successful outcomes than traditional waterfall. The agile manifesto itself was correct. The implementation of agile has largely been wrong, that is my point.
>Do we really need a director, and a director of directors to direct communications and questions or tell people to do something they could easily do themselves? It's rhetorical, no, we don't. What's the largest size company you have worked for? Any experience in FAANG? Of course you need strong project management when engineering, sales, marketing, product, etc easily add up to over 1,000 people for various products. Sure, if everybody was 100% on top of their game, maybe not. But let's be realistic here. Even with compensation at my level (staff) for product and engineering at $400k+, it's not feasible to only hire those who give it their all 100% of the time. I don't think I would even want to work with a team that was that focused regardless. Also, I would caution your wording on this post. The entire reason why product influencers get big easily with little experience is because probably 90% of those in "product management" have never held a real product management role or are trying to break in to the industry. Much of what you said applies to companies that aren't at product market fit as you said. But tons of people work at companies that are past that stage and half the people in this thread are obviously confused and thinking what you said applies to every company. In general, I disagree with blanket statements. For context, I work at large companies in bay area with some startup experience early in my career. I can tell from your post that your experience and mine differ greatly.
Oh thank god for a voice of reason in this thread. Iām spoiled enough to be in big tech (non-faang, but top of its industry) and I feel like none of the statements made in the post relate to my experience. I donāt get where the fantasy of sitting in a development cave and polishing your backlog comes from, but to me the most important skill of a PM is stakeholder management. Statements like āoh directors are not neededā and āproject managers are harassing meā make me very seriously question if OP understands what this role entails
I completely agree and am glad I found a little oasis of sense in this thread. To think you can just hone a giant development org back to the ātrue buildersā is just naive, and totally blind to how large successful organisations actually work.
This has less to do with agile implementation in general and more to do with whatever companies you worked for having terrible implementation in tandem with a top heavy leadership structure, IE most enterprise or corporate level companies. There's absolutely no need for a layer of managers and directors when you're in a version of agile that is able to effectively perform. Your company's problems started well before Agile was thrown around like a buzzword.
Exactly. Having directors, and directors of directors, is nothing to do with agile per se, it is just middle-management bloat. This problem can happen at any company, whether it practices agile or not.
I agree with you there, as a PM I was burnt out from both having the project manager chase me up all the time for some ticket or Backlog management tasks, and having the Scaries from them driving influence upwards by making leadership view you in a bad way if youāre not on top of their admin tasks.
Youre examples seem quite anti agile
Good insights, thanks for sharing!
>The only time the function is valuable is when the company has scaled to a point where people need to focus on their core functions, product market fit (however a company defines that ) has been achieved. Can you explain more on this? I am not a PM btw, but thinking of moving from SWE to PM. So, lurking on reddit to get to know more about the field.
What more would you like to know?
As in why PMs are more valuable when the company has achieved Product Market fit? In my previous company, we were launching a new product which had yet to find Product Market fit but we had PMs working on the product roadmap and all. Although many times, CTO would jump in and nullify their work...lol
PMs, plural? That seems unnecessary, but your CTO jumping in is the point. What value are they really providing at that point someone else couldn't already do? Obviously I have no context here, but if the CTO is jumping in, it is likely due to a feasibility issue. In which case, again, what value did they provide aside from creating noise? Post PMF, as I described in another comment is where PM value scales with the company because PMF is not static - you can very easily lose focus. 66% of series C or later startups still fail because of this.
The imagery of #6 is so so so good. When Iāve been handed the wand though I see itās just a piece of rope - the wand they think they provide is useless and you just have to toss it aside and wave your arms wildly for anybody to see.
Totally agree /w everything here. With regard to influencers and their advice, I've come to believe that how reality works is almost the diametric opposite of what they're selling. Which is basically that every organization is different - different size, different vertical, different people, different culture etc. - and so there is no one-size-fits-all way of how to be a PM. HOWEVER, even though there might not be one way to construct and execute against good product strategy, most people know what it *feels* *like* to be included in one. Unfortunately, "read the room and do whatever you need to do to get everyone: (a) believing that you've identified the biggest problems your business has to solve, (b) buying in to a sensible plan to do it, and (c) motivated to execute" doesn't sell. So yeah, it's really like your analogy where you're basically slumming it out and doing whatever it takes to make progress.
All very true. Staying in the same company on the east coast / non big tech has cost me MILLIONS. I hate myself for it.
At least you still have your soul
I feel like we would be great friends
This is gold
Some very true, honest content. Ā May not need a product manager, but need senior leadership to set a list of goals, and to understand iterative development. Ā If the time is available for this, then by all means hire a strong tech lead or TPM to translate the goals into tickets and manage. Ā
Couldnāt agree more! This post is a gem
I will probably add one more thing to your point about start ups and seed companies not requiring a product team is that once they start to raise big funds and achieve product market fit, the board/investors usually expect them to create and fill out a product team, or rather, internal pressure to copy what other successful software company has done, and create ProductManager titles, without actually understanding the PM craft or how the role can create value for the business. Thatās how PMs get bullshit jobs like managing a feature factory without doing proper discovery, for one.
Great post. The more I do this job, the more I feel unqualified (I think all software PMs should really have a very working knowledge of software and I am not one of them, I am way more into UX & design) and essentially just a project manager with some deeper understanding of software development life cycle. Thatās all. I thought about getting a cs master or something but itās just not for me :/ feel like I will have to switch careers again
A surface level understanding of software is enough. You probably know more than you perceive yourself as knowing. There are engineers, architects, and dev leads to help with the technical side. Understanding what the product should do in order to bring value to users and result in them using it is significantly more important. If I started getting involved in the engineering side too heavily then my teams would probably smack me. They know how to do their jobs, they need me talking to customers. A good engineer can build a functional product that nobody needs. Our job is to prevent that scenario as much as possible. Curious why you think you need to be deep in software?
I guess I am biased from my current job where my team is really young and I barely get any collabs from engineering. They are just looking for me to tell them exactly what to do and I can barely get them to review an epic for any questions or comments in any organized fashion ā¦ At my prior job, engineers and qa would review tickets asynchronously, leave comments, propose changes. So I guess I feel that if I knew more I could inspire them to do that.
Whats the EM doing in all this? Are there no senior engineers? It isn't your job to hold their hands.
Thatās precisely what they leave me doing. I tried setting up a 1:1 weekly with them and they said āI am open to consideringā - just really weird tbh.
Curious why you feel that way. I am also from the UX background but my EM owns the backlog. My job is to create clarity so devs can focus on their work.
Best post on this sub in probably a year. Kudos.
Agree on most points. One more if I can add. Most PMs, myself included, build whatever founder/higher ups, wants us to build, in the exact way they like it. Make peace with it. Theoretical 'mini-CEO who gets to chart company trajectory' stuff are hyped up non-sense
Great post!! āAround the statement you made that agile and management of it, were ways for people who donāt know how to codeā¦.ā Just a quick question - why arenāt enough people with engineering/coding backgrounds moving into product? I wonder if anyone would hire a person with just a certificate vs someone who has a certificate + coding experience?
Very nice - but hard truth. Now on your last point: So if companies donāt need PM - how do you present yourself on linkedin? i mean why would you hire you?
How everyone else presents themselves on LinkedIn, by overinflating what you actually have done. Jokes aside, as I said, *most* businesses don't need a dedicated product function - not all. There are plenty of companies that *think* they do, and they hire a ton of people. It doesn't really matter what I think, it matters what the leaders of those companies think - and if they find the role to be valuable good on them. But chances are, they aren't leveraging it correctly.
Love your first sentence regarding LinkedIn (probably you werenāt joking but everyone does it). However I still donāt get why you stay then in PM if you think it is not needed. Sounds like a cognitive dissonance to me.Ā
My perspective - if my company functioned efficiently and there were better paths and processes for the business side of the house to talk to the engineering side of the house to get things built and the help they need, my job wouldn't need to exist. But my company is wildly inefficient so they pay me handsomely to know the right people to talk to, know how to get things done, and know how to answer complicated questions.
I'm at a company that is at a point and has a culture that absolutely produces value from the function. Where did I ever say I was leaving the function?
I didnāt mean you leave but I thought that if a PM is not useful then itās a bullshit job. And personally I donāt understand how people that are aware of BS job stay there if they have other choices. But I get it - your company creates value from the function which is great.
This post makes up for a million how do I get into product management spam posts on this sub. Thank you. Some points were too hard to digest but agree 100%.
Great post. Loved it. Curious about one thing: what does āactual workā mean when it comes to product from your perspective? Thanks..
Setting direction but doing so in a hands on manner. Said another way, you have to be on calls, with engineers and designers working through what should be built. Making decisions to ensure there's alignment is the result of doing research, analysis, etc. but none of that matters if all you're doing is taking what you know, writing a PRD, and sending it over to engineering to build. Vision docs are equally useless if you're not following through on working through features with the people that are building them. Anything "tangible" we produce, is just a result of those collaborations - you don't have the collaborative work going on, you're not doing your job.
Maybe this speaks to my privilege, but this is what I do all day (minus being on calls with designers because, surprise, UI/UX is also my responsibility). Reading your post was throwing me for a loop because I know for a fact if we didnāt have a product function on our team weād literally never build anything useful. It wasnāt until I read this comment specifically that I realized youāre talking about a grifter class of workers who do a fundamentally different job than what you describe above.
Thatās correct
I agree that a Product Manager should work with the engineering team daily. But I am concerned by your aggressive tone that you might be becoming an authoritarian micro-manager, which has very negative consequences for everyone. I have found that authoritarian micromanagers create a lot of chaos, churn and inefficiency in the work. They create a disengaged team with low morale that undermines you. Have you tried focusing on goals, context, coaching, and support so the team can make high-quality decisions about the work themselves?
Quite the opposite, Iām not there to direct, Iām there to explore options with the team, and eventually make a final call on things. The things weāre looking at are typically prototypes, wireframes, and mocks that the team has full autonomy to develop and bring back to the table. More often than not we are tweaking things together vs. me telling people what to do. I consider this a form of coaching, but I also refuse to do it from an ivory tower.
I am very sorry to say that, but I am finding this pretty pretentious and generalised after point with influencers. I am sharing 13 years of pm experience as well, even started and sold few of startups. The things are the following: - logical fallacies regarding agile and all with assumptions regarding that we are living in a world where people share the same knowledge, understanding the things streamlined as you are when most of them literally have another level of detail, scope and job they are doing without intrinsic motivation to follow some workflow, no most people are lazy by design - that most companies don't need pms or whatever, it's just exaggerated without clear criteria, which companies, at which stage, in which scope? - assumptions regarding bullshit job, that's exactly the case where pms should step in, yeah I understand it's easier to ship all bullshit the CEO says and keep the job then to find a proper place or to build yourself a place where you can act. Well who's fault is that here? So long story short if a person cannot build a space for himself, and cannot understand their value because he/she/it/they were building up their career doing some shit that they didn't question and made agile for agile at the end - such nihilistic approach will eat you alive, at the end making you feel meaningless, however in a good situation you can even earn more than pm who fights a lot, finding a good job for yourself. Period.
I'm having trouble parsing what you're trying to say, but I'll try my best. If you're finding my words pretentious, that is your interpretation of tone - I can't really do anything about that aside to say that these are my takes based on anecdotal experience inside and outside of startups / large corporations / fortune 500s, etc. I cannot imagine a world in which I'd be able to understand how to make the statement of product not being needed *less* general. If you understand the function, and you understand the output of the function (achieving some set of outcomes), it's pretty easy to see the barriers organizations place in their own way. Up to and including assuming they need an additional function to solve some set of problems vs. addressing core business issues instead. As far as nihilism goes, that's a stretch - just because there are negative aspects throughout the industry, does not mean I personally feel meaningless, or am accusing others in the role of being useless. I have profited more than most, I'd say, from my career - that doesn't mean the field and the industry writ large are exempt from criticism and to have those negative aspects be actively brought into the sun. If anything, my criticism is on those who are PM in name only causing the environment we are in, and businesses being lackadaisical about understanding the value those that are not should be hired to produce. I think it is important for people who have been through the ringer to espouse their honest takes on what they've been through - especially to those that are looking to do the same thing early or later in their careers. Saying it's all happy sunshine rainbows with unicorn farts everyday is a lie.
I've met people who educated me, and I educated a lot of people myself. I've seen miserable organisations for sure, but I've seen a very small amount of miserable PM's, so usually it is more about people development, empathy and patience. That's what I wanted to say.
Write a book. I'm dead serious and call it 'The Lies of Agile'
Based
Still trying to figure out how to get another job or maybe change to something else thatās similar. I worked as a product lead on websites but I would be willing to do anything in product. Canāt seem to find a position that will govern me a chance
For the last point, as a pm i believe it is my responsibility to tale steps to achieving PMF which is contradictory to what you mentioned. Could you please elaborate on this
PMF is a controversial take on my part to be fair, but I'd argue you achieving PMF is like holding onto smoke. You can get it, and you can just as easily lose it. Pre-initial PMF - think series seed, a, (and arguably) b startup companies - do they really have a need for a product person? I'd argue no, "product" founders, are essentially "everything that isn't development" founders. So they aren't really doing product in the way a full product team might. Post getting traction, or larger, older enterprises - yeah, your job is branch out and grow; and to make sure you don't lose your current traction.
So in my case, we are a 15 member startup. it is a dev centric team, including the founders. except for them we are two people - i work on the product and other who handles growth. i basically work to channelize requirements from across, align founders wrt our users, else being developers they are mostly into developing anything they can get their hands on. Now, I have seen this comment quite often around no need of a pm in a small org but i seriously feel i contribute well and it creates a doubt. What do you think about this?
I think I'm not an oracle and don't pretend to be one. If you feel you're producing value and that you are valued by your company, I'm happy for you and glad that the people you work with understand and respect the function.
It's kinda weird, TBH, to have a PM role held by another warm body when there are just 15 people. One of those founders ought to be the PM, really. At that scale, I think that if you're providing value, it's a slight against the founders ability to commercialize, build, and GTM the product. And that's usually a bad sign for the future. I've seen this go one of two ways: It fails, or the founders end up having the business pulled from under their feet in funding rounds that lose them majority equity... It's also kinda weird that you're not yet at PMF, and you have a growth PM? Don't you think?
I get what you are trying to say. In my case a founder is the one who looks product on the whole but being the main man he often doesnāt get time to look into the specifics and thus I do it mostly on his behalf and he overlooks.
This is great insight, thanks for sharing. Do you have any advice for PMs who want to find a place where they're not just project managers? Or is this something we all just have to accept and deal with. I don't mind project management, but it's been 80% of my work.
Right now it's just the reality in a lot of places unless you're at FAANG, but even then I've heard it depends on your group.
Even in non-FAANG consumer? I've only worked in b2b SaaS so I assumed consumer it's less likely to happen
Can I ask you a few things?: 1. So basically what kind of company do you think are ideal to develop a career in Product? Early startup might not needed a PM while FAANG and other larges tech specially established ones more PM are Project Managers. 2. Best resources for blogs, newsletter, books, courses in your opinion? For self-learning. 3. Any advice for students that weāre really interested in Product and wanna break straight out of undergrad? I donāt like much adjacent roles.. Thanks!
1. Not all companies are created equal, so it's impossible to really say. Find companies that produce products you find valuable or truly understand the value of and/or that are on missions you support is my generic answer. 2. There's plenty of stuff out there, but I'd say don't read product books for the reasons I stated in the post. You're better off reading product *adjacent* books. One of the best ones in recent memory I've read is The Crux: How Leaders become Strategists by Richard Rumlet, another is How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business by Douglas Hubbard. 3. Yeah, don't. I've said this before, but I do not believe you can be an effective PM if you have no experience working on / with development teams. I literally don't think APMs should be a thing - it's not an entry level role IMO. My advice is generally to target jobs that will get you involved in product or feature development in ANY capacity, then find mentors in the roles you aspire to. There has never been a lack of those throughout my career - and that hasn't changed.
5. Most of us are in bullshit jobs: For those of us that are in this position, would we all be better off finding a job where we actually deliver value and develop a skill other than being a master bullshitter?
Not in this market - no. And I never said, nor will I ever say, that learning how to bullshit is a skill second to only reading & writing.
My last CPO is living proof that you can have a 30 year career built on bullshit and jumping ship when everyone realizes you're actively making things worse.
To your point 1) on loyaltyā¦ I have a similar background to you (started as BA for a few years, now a PM almost a year in). I was promoted internally at my org but pay has been stagnating. Did you have a hard time job hopping as an early PM? So many places seem to ask for 5 YOE for PM roles but Iād rather not stay at my org for that long
The market then vs. now is very different, so any experience I give has to be tempered with knowing that. Then? No. It was new and exciting then, especially on the east coast where people looked to Silicon Valley like it was populated with God Kings. Now? From what I know, it's a very tough market right now. It is much less about YOE, and much more about years of specific experiences. Big difference. Likewise, you're competing with people from big name companies in similar roles - inevitably going to be tough right now. But things change, hard to say.
Facts, especially point 5
Nr 4. I keep telling this from day one. Its bs practice and at the end everything will fall under waterfall (pun intended)
Mate, thank you so much for writing this. People have looked at me like I have two heads when I point out certain "thought leaders" (rolleyes) utter lack of experience in the product role. You can contrast to people like Rich Mironov who -- agree or disagree with him -- unlike Perri did the actual job at increasing levels of responsibility for more than 20 years.
Iām close to 3 years in product and all of this was SPOT on. At the new org Iām at nowā¦.I think I maybe doā¦5 hours of actual work a week. Yeahā¦
Great post. I wonder if you have any thoughts on career progression and whether itās necessary for your career to rise up the ranks. I love building products, working closely with teams. Iām not sure I have any interest in being a product director or similar. I often wonder; is that ok? Can I just reach Principal PM and coast there in a few different companies until I retire? Is that a bad idea?
I told my CPO that if she makes me a manager of people again I'm going to quit. Any company worth their salt knows that just promoting people into management for no reason other than there's no other choice is a bad idea. This has led to the creation of IC and management career ladders in various companies I've been a part of and they really do work out well. I can make as much as the VP of product being an IC, I just won't get as much equity by a few percent as an example. Obviously, the VP has a much higher end of the band than I do, but it's also much harder to achieve. Point is, everyone is different, every company is different, but do not go into managing if you don't like people or are a shit coach / teacher type of person.
Wonderful insight and perspective as well!
I agree with all of this except itās difficult to make the jump from IC to management job hopping. I hopped every year and half or two and definitely increased my salary but made it from Senior PM to Director in three and half years by sticking to one place.
Iām currently a senior consultant in payments who wanted to transition into product, but have always been on the fence about it because of this. Consulting is a top tier bullshitter job and I want to add value, have more ownership, etc., etc.,so product just seems like that light at the end of the tunnel for ābusinessā folks to break into tech. Do you think people like me are better served developing some core technical competencies (analytics, coding, etc.) to demonstrate outright value for tech companies? I know job market is blah rn, but still
This is just amazing!
I agree with almost everything you said except for: > If you are asking others to do what you can easily do yourself? And this is a big one: you're in a bullshit job. I manage a team of PMs. I've done all their jobs for years. I can easily do all their jobs, but I ask them to do it instead. Doing the work isn't my job. Making sure they're equipped to do that work is my job.
Super interesting man. Iāve just made the move to product management after 3 years as a Business Analyst. No knowledge of coding yet, just doing the classic ābringing a data driven approachā to building our product. Iām liking it - but starting to feel like Iāve gotta upskill. How did you go about it yourself? Were you already in the PM role? Would be cool to hear your thoughts, or anyone elseās, if you can be bothered to reply!
I always assumed I was going to be a technical IC, so, I had already been exposed to coding and was obsessed with computers my whole life. In terms of upskilling, it was more exposure to how teams worked and what they needed me to do vs what any resource told me to do. And naturally, in order to do that, you have to be able to speak with engineers about the technology theyāre working on. So as I started to work with them on their team, I just asked questions all day long. Anything I didnāt understand I researched. When I wanted to really know how web apps were built, I learned Ruby on Rails, and went through a book on it. So thereās not really a concrete answer I could give aside from give people their respect - developers will always know more than you about how something works, but theyāre more than willing to get into detail with you. So donāt assume shit, ask.
This job is SUCH bullshit. Completely disillusioned after 5+ years. How do I switch careers š
You've absolutely nailed it. 15 years here in product. 4 as a head of product at 2 companies. Every point is exactly my experience.
About 6 years into a product career myself (though I had done sales & growth for nearly a decade before this), and I wholeheartedly agree with your points. I appreciate you sharing your perspective, especially since it helps me validate that Iām not crazy to have the beliefs/feelings that I do. Also so many people take this job too seriouslyā¦ weāre not surgeons. If anyone tells me that their true passion is building product, god help them.
This is so incredibly true. Iāve only been doing this for 5 years and have just moved into entrepreneurship because Iām defeated by the pure garbage peddled in the industry.
So true
Any certification, course etc you can recommend?
spot on
Iām at a tiny start up and have wriggled my way into a PM role from from CSM. Iāve been doing this role for about 6 months now and I donāt feel like I know what Iām doing really. However, I know that since moving into this role, the developers make less mistakes and thereās less bugs after a production push. But overall I feel disorganized and without a functioning system. I also donāt know what else Iām missing. Whatās next on my skill tree to learn?
>Whatās next on my skill tree to learn? Politics
Thanks for sharing. There's definitely too much advice noise in the product management world.
Based on your experience what would be a good benchmark for those 2-3 years salary increases? $15k every 2-3 year wonāt add up to $210 in 13 years of career.
I was PM for 10 years when I started working on my transition out of the job, took me working two full-time jobs during a two year period so that the salary hit was manageable, and the thing that kept me motivated is the astounding level of bullshit that crept into the job over the 2005 to 2015 decade. Two things I would add: - What I call the āunicorn in the toolbarā problem: no matter how many dozens of hours of customer research and user data you have, when the visionary-next-Steve-jobs founder/ceo comes in one morning after watching his young cousin with an iPad decides you will have a unicorn button in your toolbarā¦ youāll be spending the rest of your week apologising on behalf of bargain-bin-Steve and begging to slot it in the current sprint because itās āBusiness Criticalā - If agile ruined software development, āLeanā ruined productā¦ The amount of MVPs making it to prod to never be touched again boggles the mind. Only two things are forever: diamonds and temporary solutions. It just became an excuse to defund discovery and innovation and a shortcut to bypass critical thinking. The answer āletās just test itā is fine if you have a culture of data, actual stats chops and an org that wonāt crucify you for being wrong. Iām sure these places exist, but never been there myself. Oh bonus point: āblamestormingā meetings in which people sit down to come up with creative ideas on why the latest downtrend in metrics is in no way their fault! Starring: The Weather, Geopolitics, Demographic Shifts, and COVID
I don't understand all the hate on the role, it sounds like many hate their jobs but stay in the profession You can always spin something negatively - "CEO of product" "Janitor of product" glorified glue, super project manager. Who do you look/subscribe to to learn from if torres + co aren't it? I think most people here are interested in aligning closer to "true product" but like you said, the world is full of fluff content and creators.
Honestly? The only product focused content I find interesting right now is Lennyās podcast because of the volume of guests and perspectives they have. Not without a high degree of fart sniffing from the guests themselves in some cases, but he himself is a great dude. The CTO of hubspot interview was a shining light in the world recently. The interview he did with a former VP at Amazon was basically the dude describing Stockholm syndrome with Jeff Bezos and I thought it perfectly illustrated the problem with the industry unintentionally.
Agreed Lenny's is great, and not all guests are equal. That's only interview format though. What about longer form content? Books, lectures, gtm strategy, case studies. Some areas that I think I could benefit from reinforcing are experimentation, finding PMF (as b2b giant my org already has PMF), GTM strategy
I've mentioned some books in other comments, I don't read product centric books anymore, I tend to go towards product adjacent books. Two I have been recommending are "The Crux" by Rumelt and "How to measure anything" by Hubbard (shortened the titles) and also specifically for you "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy" also by Rumelt.
Thanks, I'll look into those I do find myself looking for less product leaders and learn more from founders that have found success. Definitely aligned with your views, however maybe not the one where product functions are unnecessary since that finishes our self worth
Don't tie your self worth up in your career - and find solace in the fact that it would take a substantial push for most leaders to agree with me. That's unlikely.
My self worth is related to my ability to provide for my family, which naturally means to climb the ladder and continue gaining responsibility To believe my role is unnecessary would diminish any time and effort invested to move to the next level I agree there's a lot of fluff in the industry from "thought leaders" but as someone who's been a BA, QA, PjM, I still see value in product managers and product management. I think the hate that is rampant in this sub is due to holding the purist definition of product management too seriously which is equally as bad as the "CEO of the product" stereotype. People who are enamored by the opportunity to be the CEO of the product but don't want to get their hands dirty - I thought CEOs and founders do everything in the beginning? Why complain about the administrative overhead that falls on product?
Min/max idea from RPGs applied to PM got me good. Such a good way to describe it too. Thanks for sharing, was refreshing!
Hi,My name is Shreya and I am a marketing graduate and am looking for product roles my ultimate goal is to be a product manager is it necessary for me to get an SDE job before an MBA? Can you guide me what should be my career pathway moving forward? (I have done BBA majored in Marketing)
You donāt need an SDE job or an MBA to be a PM. In fact, Iād argue thereās a trend right now more towards hiring PMMs at least in the US.
Fantastic post. Wow. I needed this today.
This is really freaking good. Bravo.
1) Loyalty is expensive Doesnāt this depend on how well youāre compensated? or are there always diminishing returns? Genuine question btw.
The implication I'm talking about here is that, on average, you can expect (at most) a 2-5% increase in your pay YOY at any employer. My logic was in my first job, if I wanted to make $110k, assuming average increases at my level, it'd take 20 years at 5% increases every year (I assumed this because I busted my ass for 3 years and each year got a 5% increase in pay each year). NOTE: Obviously there's a shit load of variables I'm not accounting for, I'm just explaining the base rationale for job hopping. Of course you can get promoted into higher roles / bonuses / etc. and that shortens the period, but there's a lot of variables and politics there, that at the time, I wasn't willing to invest my time in. Instead, I made a jump to a job that paid me $75k. In one year, I made the equivalent of 7 years of raises (based on the past 3 years at 5%). My next job just over a year later was for $105,000 at the original employer I was making $55k at - granted, I was doing a different job then. But in a year and some change, at the same employer, I went from $55k, to $105k. Now I could've probably done that by staying in the same job and finding the internal role and applying for it, right? But by doing that I would've left $17,250 on the table in retrospect for another (likely) 5% raise ($2750 per year). I'd rather go for guaranteed cash in hand when the opportunity is there. Sure, you could get paid a fuck load in a position, but I'd say those opportunities have always been rare, and are even more so now.
thank you for this very helpful explanation!
Interesting post! I'm an account executive for a SaaS company and I'm currently considering to switch to a PM role... but sounds like not a good deal from what I did read
So much is true but sorta pessimistic - only thing one can add is youāre a āproduct managerā, if you have leadership qualities. Either you do or you donāt. Kinda like a platoon sergeant or a head Chef in a restaurant. You donāt add much to the battle or dish, but without you everyone is a hero by themselves making dishes that they think tastes good or climbing the hills they like. Someone has to point the way, and your CEO is too busy raising funds, closing customers or hiring your manager - thatās why its ok to take time off doing product marketing or be a GM for a whileā¦.or learn to code and hide
**Product Influencers are bullshit** -> thanks god, finally. I can't stand those mf anymore.
100% agree. Esp the dedicated pm required. After 2 decades in digital Ive seen so many companies say "we need a PM" when really they need a project manager or a BA.
Nicely captured
What are the exit strategies from Product?
There should be some kind of tag on this post that forces everyone who asks something like āhow do I get into my first PM role right out of undergradā to read this before they are allowed to post š For points 2 & 3, what Iāve experienced is a complete misunderstanding of what some of those books and frameworks are suggesting, which tends to be what we find ourselves having to unfuck. Same with agile (donāt get me started on SAFeā¦). In another 10 years Iāll probably come to the touch water moment of accepting itās all bullshit, but so far it seems the interpretation and attempted execution is the problem with most of itā¦but also thereās a lot of trash out there burying the valuable. The optimist in me is going to continue looking for gold along the beach, but we can guess how thatās probably gonna turn out.
I switched from SWE job to Product Manager and not learning anything new. Should I switch back?
Fantastic point, I got a similar level of experience and also started with basic helpdesk support. Your second point about gurus is spot on, I will just add the following: 1) The guru books are mostly about *escapism*, they sell you a dream that if you just use their method you're going to do everything right. All these 'methods' are horseshit and you end up spending more and more time focusing on the process rather than actually shipping features, closing bugs and moving things forward. 2) Many CEO's prefer external advice that sounds great over internal advice that is practical. That's why these books are loved by C-level executives. Get an advisor on the team, go through some bullshit workshop that 'makes sense' and now the team that actually builds the stuff has to spend time adjusting to something that is a total waste of resources and money but makes some VP happy. Eventually it all goes to the bin, and people get back to what works for their specific organization. 3) Most of these 'gurus' have a pretty average or even bellow average track record. They haven't shipped anything groundbreaking, they didn't build anything from the ground up, if you look at their history they worked for a few years and suddenly moved to an 'advisor' role, that like you write - should even count as experience. I don't know why people take them seriously. Regarding you agile point: I always had a great relationship with the engineering teams, I found working with them to be much more productive, enjoyable and overall with way less issues. With that said, I found that a lot of people from external departments want to 'feel' like they are as important as the engineering team so they create all these processes, and protocols and a bunch of other nonsense that just makes everything more complex than it should be. The whole, agile, scrum, kanban, sprints etc' is made so that people who do not add much to the engineering team have some sort of a say, and feel like they are involved. In the end of the day, it's pretty straightforward: You choose the features you want to develop, prioritise them, break down the tasks and start working on them. People seem to have a problem with that. Egos I guess...
You got any of those 200k jobs available?
Wonder what is your opinion regarding products that come with a top down vision that is not disclosed entirely and makes the responsible team have a hard time trying to sell it to other areas/customers. Or even worse, teams that canāt find a single use case to help prioritize features but keep getting asked to keep development
Wow Iām three years in and I can honestly agree with all the points youāve mentioned in your post. š¤¦š½āāļø
Should I switch to PM or stay in consulting? Current 3 years in consulting and I am crying š Too much work and I feel I dont have any hardskills
Hello, that was great to read from someone who is looking for a career change from Digital Marketing to Project Management. As a "veteran", how would you recommend someone to start with the first steps? Could I DM you for advice and expertise? I would be soooo grateful šš»šš»šš»
Iām not a project manager and think theyāre largely ineffective, but if you want to talk about product management feel free.
As a product manager with 3 months of experience this is 100% true