Product Manager Worth & their insecure justifications
Whenever you a call PM fraud here, they come & put justifications like you don't know business, products built by Engineers are shyt, only PMs can build good products, engineers don't prioritize business needs bla bla.
A data scientist/analytics perspective:
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When we call a PM fraud, we refer to mainly those who come without a background in either of tech or business. Cool wannabes straight out of college & learnt nothing but attitude over years. If a PM was an engineer, or analytics, or business or ops, then others first see him/her as engineer/etc & then a manager. That's the right way it should be.
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'Business won't be prioritized' is such a complacency: Business is bread & butter of Analytics and AI. It is the primary thing we check in interviews, a large portion of the interview focus' on the problem statement and prioritisations.
End note: PMs are hot, but only when they have a solid foundation in stuff they are building. They need to know depths. Anyone apart from this breed are worthless & Indian startups are filled with this shyt A best PM would be a senior engineer/analyst with penchant for business practicality & customer perspective.
Why of 1st Point? Because how can you manage a team when you don't even know what that team does? For eg: I can tell my PM any random blabbing about why model is working/not & she has no idea to judge my words. Leave AI, with tech pipelines too I can give any deadlines & justify it how would she know? Besides if they don't have tech background they bring in random expectations which is far away from feasibility. Why should any tech guy respect them? They can understand business req, connect with business teams and build better. That's the exact role of a project manager.
All these comments on PM not knowing tech(being dev before) is bad - come from folks measuring stuff from #volume of features shipped, which is a very service sector mindset, where delivering stuff is all important.
Well PMs are hired to move metrics, not to release features - which anyone can co-ordinate or project manage. For the kind of user facing consumer or b2b products most jobs are - the tech understanding needed for the PM is enough to speak on behalf of dev team in a room without devs to push back and set expectations right against- the marketing head who thinks launching a V2 of the web product should be doable in 10 days right.
So there's an example quoted about Data Science projects - well boss if say you are in content feed pod at a startup and your DS model or any set of interventions doesn't improve engagement metrics then about time when everyone gets canned.
The above are thoughts on the importance of PM roles in non feature factory or delivery only teams. If you are delivery team PM then it's just a fancy label to get more applicants to a project management role.
Now addressing OPs point on timelines - boss the onus falls on you to communicate. You have to explain why it will take Y time instead of X and justify or suggest ways to cut scope and still meet X timeline. You will get a push back, you reply again taking the new points, again you get some new expectation that's much better than before - guess what it is called - negotiating at work. This is something everyone does at work weather across pods like product<>engg or within teams between your manager<>you on tasks assigned. Other person will never know what you know better and need to communicate.
If you dear confronattions that come from negotiations then not working on it will not take you much ahead in places where collaboration is key.
This is just an average PM talk at best sorry.
'PMs are hired to move metric' well that's business job primarily. I will rephrase you: 'PM are hired to move metrics by building products'. Yes that building part is crucial. If you cannot think beyond 'tech understanding that you guys have is enough ' especially when ur critical job is get things done by building tech, is what you makes you barely average & believing it means you have deluded yourself by indulging too much in our Indian PM ecosystem. Majority are like this.
Negotiations, yes we negotiate with business, we give timelines to them. What are you doing in between? If you folks atleast had solid tech background, then you were valid to negotiate on our behalf, if not you just copy paste us to business and vice versa
Business team to solely move metrics - of course you are in a b2b sales led org, where founders and sales make the money and engg, product design are cost concious to deliver what is fully asked. Your PMs are yes men to sales and founders and project manage with the "builder". Your case is helpless and yea probably grapevine team needs to build a project management sub for the average cases to share feedback and improve.
What I'm talking about with moving metrics is a pure consumer facing tech led buisness - best examples Facebook, YouTube which are driven by user generated content, and the key metric to grow was MAU and make it super scaled where they could run ads and other monetisation models. These examples are pioneers of what great experiments and practices the best PMs did and there literature around that : ex No filters: inside story of IG, Chaos Monkeys (for ads PMs in FAANG)... Opportunities like these are not average and usually top 5percentile, and similar candidates in India are like top 5 percentile PM jobs at most, rest of all job opportunities suck or need the "PMs" to work with low agency ICs and babysit even changing the status of a ticket.
I can say this based on starting out at a no outcome ownership less b2b startup to working at multiple pure product led consumer product startups. (When I say product led I don't mean tech led. Essentially business and feature metrics owned by PM and work with high agency developers, designers and analysts to run experiments that are prioritised and justified with reasoning and visibility.
PM bashing has become very common.
When I was an engineer, I too felt that a PM didn't add much value. However , after becoming a PM I understand the burden of responsibilities that comes with little or no authority. PMs are expected to be jack of all trades and hopefully a little master of one. That master trade maybe Customer empathy, design thinking , analytics , engineering , data science , sales etc. Once they become a PM its expected that they build a working knowledge of the other trades which represent stakeholders
I understand you may have come across someone who may not have lived upto your expectation. I hope you get the opportunity to empathise with PMs in general and successfully collaborate with them
ye akkal kab aayegi, humare IT sector ko. Aadhese jyda mba log product manager ban rahe hain aajkal
Don't talk like a loser. Every time I find a bug I don't write long posts ki engineering kitna faltu hai. PM is a full time job with its own nuances and techniques.
Only when it is done by the right folks. Not frauds. If you are not a fraud then you don't have to worry, that was the point of this post.
But then again, our country PMs are filled with you folks so yeah.... Keep frauding
Everyone makes mistakes. Engineers make so many mistakes that we gave their mistakes a special name and also have a full team whose job is to find their mistakes.
And you obviously have no idea about how PMs work. I have attended meetings between tech and business and seen how frustrating everything becomes because those 2 teams are very bad at talking to each other.
And what about UI/UX, what about user research? Who brings these people on board and works with them?
If you think tech has time to discuss with so many people, then you obviously don't have enough work. Ask your PM, he'll find you some work. Maybe then you won't waste everyone's time with such an ignorant take.
