Consultant, Investment Banking went from sought after careers to fads post 2008 crisis when the world realized that these folks are crooks due to their role in propogating the Great Financial Crisis.
Given the backlash tech companies has been getting and global layoffs, will Product Manager also become a passing fad?
Someone here said engineers can become PM but PM can't become engineers. It can't be more correct than this. But reality is, it sounds goods only in theory.
I asked this same question to my director, why have you hired us when engineers clearly know more about products than us and are capable? His answered that before the organisation formally created a team of product managers, it was only engineers that were handling product for decades. But that resulted into substandard products being developed, chaotic product release and consistent drop in revenue. The reason being engineers became backlog managers and engineers beging engineers, never focused on business value. Instead, they focused on technical aspect heavily. Engineers never bothered to check if what they were developing will actually sell in the market or not.
And mind you, this was a product that all of us use in daily lives. The numbers of users in India alone would be millions. So to summarise, yes, engineers can become PMs but generally they stay loyal to their pedigree of BE/B.Tech and become very shitty PMs. They like to have more technical conversations than strategic discussions and hate things that are not quantifiable, subjective. And business facing people here in forum would know, things are always not quantifiable in business planning, market outlook. It is based on assumptions.
An excellent PM would be someone who is an engineer but knows how to focus on business value of the product, make it customer oriented etc. I had the pleasure of working of one such PM in my last stint and he was truly outstanding. CEO knew him personally and this is in an organization with thousands of employees
PMs pretend to have that strong "gut feel" about things that are subjective. In reality, their opinions are hardly data backed even when it's possible to have them backed by data and they just pass off their subjective opinions as some amazing product intuitions. Software engineers don't always deal with data and I can agree that they don't always have that gut feel for seemingly subjective calls and certain business problems. Data analysts and ML scientists often deal with data. A competent data analyst or ML scientist take far better "gut calls" than PMs because they have seen data for several years. So such apparent subjective calls is not some skillset of PMs. Anyone with common sense can make a subjective call, in some cases intuition backed by weak data and data analysts or ML scientists or Software engineers make that call better depending on what product is being built. I am not questioning the iq of PMs. I am questioning the relevance of the role as some kind of specialisation. I am not of course saying all engineers make good PMs - they need to have business orientation. If I am building a company, I would rather have senior or super senior engineers/analysts/scientists in the company take product roles and completely knock out these specialised PM roles.
I for one, am the first to question the existence of PM role at all. Ideally, people who are designing the solution from grounds up, coding it should be the people who can demonstrate its value to users. Unfortunately, it rarely happens, at least in my experience. Engineers speak a language riddled with technical jargons that clients get lost within first few minutes.
In case of B2B product management, usually initial few discussions with clients are on articulating business benefit, our understanding of market, competition analysis, relaxing of contract terms. Only after these discussions, clients bring in their tech people to understand tech aspects of product. So, I would be happy if engineers can carry all kind of conversation but usually they don't.
As for ML/AI engineers, sure they have understanding of data. ML models alone are useless. Models exist to solve a business problem that existing technologies can't solve. Now, what should a ML engineer spend his time on, perfecting his model or understanding business context under which this model will bring revenue.
Like I said, an excellent PM would be someone who knows tech inside out but can also correlate it to business priorities. It's not a "gut call" , it is just the ability to cross relate insights. No rocket science.
By the way, if you think PMs are useless, what do you think of management consultants???
Becoming a PM was a fad. Shitting on PMs is also a fad.
The takes on this thread (CEO is a fad?, IB is a fad? In a deep tech company a PM is completely irrelevant?) says much more about the lack of experience and well rounded perspective of the posters than it says about role.
sour grapes
@FourFiveSix awesome comment. This is the right POV. Everyone has a problem with someone and something in this world.
When I was in banking people hated each other. When I was in FMCG internship people hated each other from other departments. That’s it
Unpopular opinion. But yeah, CEOs are fads in most companies. These are sometimes people who happen to take risk at some point in time. Some are there simply because they can speak the jargon having spent so many years in some industry. There are scientific studies that tell us that performance of the company has very little correlation with the calibre of the CEO. Anyway, PM got nothing to do with the CEO, it's just another designation in the company. An engineer can conceive every idea that a PM can think of. In a deep tech company or team, a PM is completely irrelevant since she would have little clue on practical nuances of the tech. An engineer would be the boss in such roles. The engineer wouldn't give you this honest opinion on your face since she would be bound by rules of the company. I am not making it engineer vs PM. But there is honestly no value add a PM brings in.
How is at your firm? It’s one of the most sought after role there if I’m not wrong
You see it out there. It's all about AI. Something PMs had no role to play in! It's predominantly an AI scientist job and it's not rocket science to figure out where you can integrate them. None of the big techs were founded by PMs, none of the semiconductor companies nor telecom companies! These constitute the top market cap categories. It's an engineers game and will remain so. If you have common sense and have your ears close to the market, you can be a PM. So obviously it's not a skilled job and will not be too valuable in the long run.
Product Manager is a not specialisation. Any engineer with some common sense can become a PM, PMs can't be engineers. It's not rocket science to collaborate between teams and make things happen. There are large industries that function without PMs. Project manager is essential to ensure tracking of projects. PMs, yes, they are dispensible American fads.
It’s interesting we’re still discussing the value of PM role in 2023. Go, read about sundar pichai, kids!
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