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Comment by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | Hacker News Reader

Product management feels like the kind of profession where you can get away with BSing. It's really hard to tell how much value you're truly adding. Easy to claim that the wins were thanks to you, and the losses just happened to be market conditions or luck of the draw.

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> It's really hard to tell how much value you're truly adding.

Maybe for the higher-ups, the vice presidents and the CPO. But ask a single (experienced) engineer and you will get a pretty clear picture of whether the PM is adding value or not.

What would you say are ways in which an experienced engineer could tell if the PM is adding value or not?

ChatGPT would like to know this answer

Are there anomalously few bullshit problems compared to other places you have worked? Is there weirdly little paperwork? Do other teams doing roughly similar work have ongoing problems that you just don’t have? Do you have weirdly few, oddly productive meetings?

Got it. If I'm understanding correctly, most of those qualities revolve around helping run a tight, low on overhead process where everybody is clear around priorities and what everybody else is working on?

Yeah. You come as close as possible to the product manager being the only point of contact outside the team because they know what everyone is doing and why they’re doing it in sufficient detail that they can do the communication work so everyone else can do the production work.

Ok, great.

The reason why I was asking is that it sounds to me that we're talking about two different roles entirely.

Yours is indeed quite valuable, but would be often called "project manager", whereas the one I'm talking about is more the customer-facing stakeholder-convincing business-outcome-responsible "product manager". See the difference explained here: https://www.coursera.org/articles/product-manager-vs-project...

Is that a fair assertion?

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