Hacker News Reader

Comment by sunpazed | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been in product management for over 20 years, and I agree with most of what is said here. Ratios matter. CPOs end up empire building with an army of PMs. The organisation ends up with PMs owning a slice of the customer experience such as a single page, optimising CTRs on buttons, with no meaningful contribution to the product strategy or vision. It’s hard to be a Product Manager without owning a product.

View on HN

Longtime PM as well, and I strongly agree. PMs should have lots of surface area —- ideally, an entire product (or more).

PMs should also be a lot more focused on the business’ goals than most PMs are. It’s necessary but insufficient to solve problems for your users. Solving those problems needs to translate into value for your company too.

Strong, product-minded Eng/UX partners are essential in enabling that.

This. The closer to the P&L the better. It forces you to act as a "whole product" manager and not think everything is solved by adding a new feature.

Indeed. PMs are paired on a scrum master level. Then scrum master - due to the fact that they are "SCRUM MASTERS" and not developers focus also on PM type work. To make matters worse the "easily interchangeable" developers are coming from an outsourcing company. Now the development needs to be isolated from the customers with more management. It is a great way to increase the GDP.

> It’s hard to be a Product Manager without owning a product

I'll say it depends on the size of the product. If you're dealing with say ERPs (Oracle Fusion Apps, WorkDay, SAP, etc), a PM can't own an entire product. Instead, they'll own multiple features where each of those features are complex in themselves and being ERP typically involve integration with multiple other products.

But I agree with the general thrust of your point which seems to be that the PM should own something 'significant'

Reply on news.ycombinator.com