What excites you about being (or wanting to be) a Product Manager?
I am curious to know what other (aspiring) product managers’ motivations are.
Not excites me at all. Product managers live in illusion world where they truly believe that they control their product, but this is ultimately not true. Engineers are the ones who make products and are in charge of product success or failure.
Its not key who “owns” the product but there should be one leader to guide and make a call when it is x vs y. To deliver a successful product whoever the owner is, they need to be customer obsessed and not ownership obsessed.
Agree with everything you said but no one discussed money on this thread did we? And by the way, PMs are typically paid less than SDEs, well at least in Amazon.
I like having my hand in all pots. PMs are the way to connect business and development. I’m a jack of all trades (and master of none haha), but I like that. I get to work with management on business strategy, with marketing, UX, analytics, and of course dev.
Nothing...only money
Doing nothing but get all credit
Why would people give credit to someone who does nothing? 🤔
Seems there's a lot of hate for PM's here. Weird flex. As a PM I make sure my devs are working on the right things and not getting pulled in 10 directions (well, I try). I try to protect their time so they can focus on the product. I focus on the org and big picture so they can focus on delivering working product as much as possible.
The paycheck.
When i am not around my eng team literally does not work (sometimes not even showing up), let alone focus on delivering customer value. Sometimes i become the people manager of the team while eng leadership has to work on the architecture and tech vision for the next few years
😂 same
You are the owner of the product. Everyone looks upto you as the CEO and you are held accountable for decisions related to Ideation, UX, Data, Permissions, Experimentation, Features, Prioritization, QA, Tech, Trainings, Stakeholder Management (Upstream, Internal Partners/Service, Users/Customers), Resourcing, PR, Legal, Privacy, UAT, Release, Measurement, Business Reporting. If it's your product, if no one is there to do X then the PM does it - big or small. Did I miss anything? A job with unparalleled scope compared to any other role in the digital era!
Agreed but the most ideal case, PM must think big and influence the execution, not execute him/herself. At amazon though I have seen PMs get a bit technical and start biasing requirements and taking shortcuts for success or focus on things that are marketable while the actual product suffers.
Agree that a PM should focus more on roadmap and the long term vision but not all PMs get that opportunity. It depends on where the product is in its lifecycle. My point was to indicate breadth of scope and highlight that the role can get hands-on, ie get into the weeds of each of these domains one time or another. A PM's role is more of influence and when gets pulled into these rabbit holes can take time away from big picture stuff. Hence the PM's second best obsession after customers should be prioritization.