As a Product Manager, why do Software Engineers act so rude?
PM of 5 years. Same place the whole time. We have a new Engineering Manager. They started 2 months ago and at first they seemed like they were very happy to learn our process and products. Then they soon started to manipulate the Engineering team which was very cooperative earlier. It’s incredibly demotivating. We are a small startup, and the culture isn’t great but seriously no need to be so dismissive of other people’s efforts and feelings. They are just fucking rude. No other word for it really. The problem is that they do NOT get the product side of things so you can’t explain anything to them. They start to physically roll their eyes when you go anymore product than the word “PRD”. I have never had to deal with someone like this and it’s really stressing me out as they are involved in effectively every project I work on. Advice that isn’t “quit” will be appreciated. I should also clarify that when I say “product limitations” I really mean how much effort goes into getting things right, the delays are shearing the roadmap apart. why do Software Engineers act so rude? How to solve this in my team?
Samayondo
Stealth
5 months ago
Maybe have a talk with the leadership regarding this?
Copenhagen
Stealth
5 months ago
@Samayondo I did and they are supporting the EM on this stating that it is a non-issue.
BengaluruLandLord
Stealth
5 months ago
Ofcourse they will. Product managers usually from what I have seen in Industry have 0 business sense and 0 technical sense. They are totally useless.
Any analysis or even the crap PRD they build will lack reality checks. Ideas and justifications will be more like a prayer rather than based on any analysis and most importantly they will be based on movie fantasies.
You want people to care for your feelings? Cute!
Maybe:
1. Listen to the EM. Accept his leadership, even if you don't agree, accept it to just understand him and to bring value to org
2. Through this, ask genuinely what would he have rather built/how he wants product to bring in value.
Product manager is a very useless title. You are not the leaders of an org. You are rather the most incapable ones in it. My advice is, before dismissing that atleast try to understand why. Maybe then u will add a bit more value than now.
Till then u r a nobody and u can expect sympathy but not respect from a tech or a business guy.
Good luck!
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BahadurBilla
Stealth
5 months ago
Documentation is key. Keep the leadership in loop, reduce the scope of the projects by 15-20% and use that time to document everything. Keep the EM in loop on these documents and keep the leadership also in on this. Proactively communicate delays to the leadership.
But be prepared to get the short end of the stick. PMing in India is highly under appreciated. The leadership has to intervene in such a scenario and all you can do is gather the data points and make a good case for yourself and the initiatives you are working on.
Wish you all the best for it. Hang in there, will come a time when PMs will garner equal or more respect than their EM counterparts, just like in the valley. Till then brace for a bumpy ride. Also if you want to connect on specifics of your problem, feel free to dm.
Copenhagen
Stealth
5 months ago
@BahadurBilla I will try your advice out. i am very non confrontational and this is hard on me.
Bad advice.
If u need to command respect you just need to deserve it.
God.
Go build a real product or real business first. Then come back and try to be Product Manager. Till then u r a nobody. And you will continue to beg for leadership to protect you. 🤦
Accept it. You were just a weakling let into tech industry but has no place in it. Earn it first
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Your story lol sketching the EM as the villain while you might be the one doing all this. The reason Software Engineers are seen as rude is because they don't best around the bush and feed the deluulu people in corporate. Tough luck they will still have the job if they quit or get laid off, we are getting paid for our problem solving skills(actual problem solving not jargon English problems).
Copenhagen
Stealth
5 months ago
@deloittelabour i am not going to entertain your comment with a response beyond this. I know you are about to get ratio'd.
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GrubbyRoom95
Stealth
5 months ago
You need to speak up, i) Directly to them first ii) To the leadership than simply taking their shit.
From my experience, unless you speak up with authority and point out wrong behaviours, people take you and your work for granted
Copenhagen
Stealth
5 months ago
@GrubbyRoom95 Yeah that is what i will try to do here now. Do you have any advice?
Thucydides
Stealth
5 months ago
Everyone is smart enough to respect where money flows
I doubt their resentment is something that came up suddenly
Maybe new Eng Guy is trying to align resources after evaluating that most time spent by Engs is pointing to no revenue
I work under a manager/mentor who extremely rude to PM and CSMs in general
I have never met a more focused person than him ever
Have spent enough time under management to see most Client facing guys are not focused enough to say no to random requests by Client
MBA grads wanna maintain the relationship with clients rather build a product that recieves widespread adoption
Product Building and Eng is hard, and the ones who nail them move to USA and print stocks
Most Blr based product companies are wrapper around Service Based product because we would rather waste everyone's time/money rather pointing them to narrow objective of a product layer and making life easier
Tbf PMs and Client Huggers have a higher attrition than engs and focus on "Relationships" rather than Value
We understand making deals is hard
But working on creating Money-Minters is the best thing you can do ever. Great products make life easy for clients ,even if clients are not focused its your responsibility to fight and show them value
A little context:
I'm coming out a meeting with a major desi Bank. Have been having this meet for weeks where Business guys throw around words and toss emails with nothing to show for
Keep in mind all these morons have big linkedIn profiles that others jerk off to
I can't contribute much since my manager didn't join till today
But today my manager took control of the meeting and opened up an excel asking what I the to-do list and who is the stakeholder
All of those guys just ran for their lives.... we had more clarity today than rest of the 2 months
BottomLine
Please focus on where the money is flowing and let that form your direction
A rude focused guy is much above a distracted tree hugger
Damn. That's one detailed explanation. Will totally agree on this.
Damn. That's one detailed explanation. Will totally agree on this.
AdeptTurret6
Stealth
5 months ago
The problem is usually a disconnect. If there's an actual problem being solved usually it's easy to get everyone on board. Software programmers are problem solvers. You have to use them accordingly.
Copenhagen
Stealth
5 months ago
@AdeptTurret6 I understand but the EM has started to turn the team against the Product team. The leadership sees this too. They are about to get fired
'Using them' see, the problem lies there. I was going through the comments. Reframing the perspective from 'using' to 'collaborating' can foster a more cohesive and productive environment. See your team members as collaborators rather than mere resources. The ultimate goal is to make the product the best. All the best!
Try to do a 1-on-1 with each member of the team starting from EM.
The agenda of the meeting should be something like this:
1. What visions do they have for the product or feature that they are working on?
2. Ask them to share suggestions that they feel is getting neglected by Product or Business but is important from Engineering perspective.
3. What would they like to see in the team's culture that would excite them?
Now the above questions are meant to show the Engineering team that you and them are just one team. The Tech team. Working on a common goal of creating a world class product.
While these things take time to yield fruits, it would give you a perspective about how each member thinks. In the next subsequent meetings, you would have better clarity on how to align the team towards common goal by trying to highlight the individual advantages and targets that they seek.
Copenhagen
Stealth
5 months ago
@Creator Thank you so much for this. I will try it out.
My 2 cents
There is a disconnect between PM and engineers, as what has been thought of by PM needs to be implemented by engineers. Steve Jobs took all the credit of engineers, PMs become the face success, but hardly take the blame. If anything brakes it directly lands on the engineers. They need to figure out what broke and what to fix.
Usually PMs who have extensive knowledge of tech, are better respected than APMs who landed directly from college. Having previous tech experience will gain you the necessary complexity engineers have to face, specially the emotional one.
GlassSkin63
Stealth
5 months ago
May be the EM just wants to protect the team from unrealistic estimates, timelines. Often engineers will give wildly optimistic estimates while not considering code quality as a NFR and agree to take shortcuts to keep product happy. If that is what you are saying has changed (team going through EM for communication of estimates), that's a good thing. Since your two roles don't overlap and EMs usually also have people management responsibilities, I'm not sure where the disconnect is. Is the team being very hostile to you compared to before? If yes then obviously that's not a normal behavior.
Copenhagen
Stealth
5 months ago
Yes the team is way more hostile than it was before
Brutallyhonest
Stealth
5 months ago
This will work against them. Keep evidence and show or provide during their rating
Copenhagen
Stealth
5 months ago
@FUDResearch Yes I will do that asap. I will try your advice out.
StanleyHudson
Stealth
5 months ago
Confront them
Ask them why they are sad
Lets not draw assumptions that they are rude for no reason
Copenhagen
Stealth
5 months ago
@StanleyHudson I will try your advice out. i am very non confrontational and this is hard on me.
EM is a useless job title. Engineers themselves don’t like it. EM don’t code, the technical guidance comes from architects. PMs give the strategic and functional guidance.
If EMs have to be recognised, they will need to throw shenanigans like this by blocking the PM, asking random questions, making horrible appraisal choices and so on
I had some deveopers who took my PRDs more seriously than I did. And I hated that
Copenhagen
Stealth
5 months ago
@WeeDoughnut And it is the worst feeling.
human
Stealth
4 months ago
7 YOE. I too feel PMs are redundant and bring nothing to the table. It's a pretty common thought process among devs imo.
If you could give an example of 1-2 instances, maybe we'll be able to judge better.
It could be your communication skills or unrealistic plans for the product OR it could just be that he's trying to save his ass, because if he doesn't escalate you, he'll be responsible for when it blows up.
I think im eligible to answer this. Im a dev with 5yrs of experience, worked both at MNC and early stage startup. The thing is engineers have ego because tech is hard skill to acquire and you have to grind hard for lot of years to expertise in this area. And now im not pinpointing all the PMs but i have seen some PMs who don’t understand the tech feasibility but insist on building a feature that they think it will be easier to do in a given time frame. The truth is it’s never easier. Even the change on the ui looks simpler the codebase will have lot of tech debts and complexity that need to be handled or else it will backfire to the engineer in the future. Now i know some engineers do have tendency to develop some features that are unnecessary. It’s just their way of challenging themselves so that they feel confident enough about their tech skills. Im not justifying either side. Both PM and engineering team should go hand on hand to make a product successful. In my company our engineering manager become the pm as well, it’s a startup so it has to be like this. Now he knows the engineering side difficulties and he understands product as well, so he argues for engineers with the ceo when something cannot be done in the said timeframe and he gives us a lot of space and freedom to work with.
hellloworld
Stealth
5 months ago
Build rapport, help them grow/promote, follow jira or whatever tool they like, never create unnecessary urgency, learning basic debugging - inspect element, postman, sql etc. solve ho jayega phir. Itna bada issue nahi hai
It’s an incentive problem. The folks who both of you report to should set incentives (appreciation) for collaboration and not rude Behaviors
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