I’m wondering what the style of Product Management tends to be at FAANG (or other top tech companies) for a senior level product manager: primarily executing on ideas that are sent down by management, or coming up with innovative solutions and getting to see them through? I think product orgs that are primarily executing on ideas conceived by leadership often flop, where as concepts designed by people who sit closer to end users and spend more of their day to day with the product tend to see more use. At the same time, being in the day to day can restrict some people from seeing the bigger picture. I haven’t found a great balance of these approaches anywhere and curious if it is out there?
I kind of can’t believe that there aren’t more responses to this. I don’t work at FAANG, so I was sitting on the sidelines, but hopefully this will spark some conversation: I think the dichotomy - like most - is an oversimplification and somewhat false. Nobody wants to work for a company without vision, and leadership should be steering the ship into the most valuable markets and toward the best customers. Those customers should have a relationship with the product managers at the time of feature specification, but this is complicated because everyone involved will have a strong sense of what they envision the solution to be. The old Netscape adage “if we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine” holds strongly here. You both want opinionated senior leadership that doesn’t just let every PM run around in whatever direction they want, and enough latitude to find out if something is wrong or needs to pivot. I’ve worked a few places where the leadership grasped this balance, and it does exist. I don’t know if FAANG tends to nail it, and would be interested to hear what people think. YoE: 8 TC: 225
Thanks for responding! It’s nice to hear that there are places where the right environment exists. I think you’re right that leadership has to enable PMs with direction and larger goals, I just have experienced that going down to a micro management level where the solution ends up prescribed. I’ve also seen teams where two PMs are working on competing products because they were given free reign. Both kind of extremes, but that’s why I wanted to ask the larger group what’s out there.