On asking PMs what they most like about the job, "impact" surely comes on the top of their list On asking Engineers why they dislike PMs, "lack of meaningful contribution" comes on the top of their list. Conflicting ideologies? What exactly is going on? Lol PM= product manager
Engineers don't properly appreciate the value a good PM adds. The opposite doesn't appear to be true.
Perception differences in my opinion. An engineer has concrete things that we do which we correlate with impact. "I checked in this awesome code that allows people to send an emoji in chat". Unfortunately the nature of pm and manager contributions is different and is not as easy to tie the day to day activity with a concrete output like code/feature built. That's why I think many junior engineers complain that their managers do nothing, their team leads are idiots and their CEO is useless.
Well said. For those who think all the CEOs are useless, I have to say that there are other types of works and impacts in the world.
The key difference is that the engineer can build the concrete feature and it can be masterful in its execution from a code standpoint, but whether it has any meaning at all in moving the needle with customers is initially defined, later measured, and owned all along the way by the PM. It’s easy to build things that look great internally. It’s hard to ensure they succeed. That’s why the PM is the single neck to wring on the business side.
There's an article on LinkedIn by a LinkedIn director of PM, it's about how to be a leader (!) and an alcoholic (!). This is the cognitive function level required by PMs. If you tell a child a thousand times he's a leader, you'll raise the next hitler. If you say that to a useless doc juggling slideshow monkey, you'll get a PM. Maybe an alcoholic leader director PM.
Those examples underline my point, "leaders" have very low intellect. And alcohol does reduce your cognitive function.
It's a completely different skill, like sales or athletics or beauty. Speaking of beauty, 30% of CEOs are 6 feet tall. only 6% of the population are this tall. And I didn't even point at political leaders.
Pigs and chickens If you don’t know what that means
If you don’t think the PM is a pig in the pig/chicken analogy, then you don’t grasp what happens to them on the business side when something fails.
I’m glad someone knows scrum
One of the reasons is that typically engineers are very good subject matter experts but aren’t aware of a lot of the aspects that make a product or business successful. Implementing a really well designed feature is useless if it’s not the right fit for the users needs. The other reason is the the PM role has a large breadth of components, and is rarely done really well across all aspects. In my experience there is often too much focus put on the technical side and so you have someone telling engineers how to do their job, which is counter productive. A great PM should really understand markets, segment customers, understand product needs, and make sure that engineers are prioritized on the right things; helping with “what” and not so much “how”. They should coordinate activities and make sure funding and resources are present. 75% of what they do will not be apparent to the engineers because much of it only becomes visible when it’s a problem.
Contribution to a good engineer means delivering quality code. Contribution to a good PM means delivering a successful product. There is a time aspect that hopefully lines up for both, but that should be a mutual goal. Good PMs make engineers aware of what business success is before, during, and after a project and from what I’ve seen, that’s where some of the disconnect is. The other parts of the disconnect often come from pivots where the PM learns something new that requires a requirements change midstream or after delivery, but the PM only does a good job of communicating the “what” and a poor job of communicating the “why” to keep developers on board with the vision and the tactics to achieve it... if developers only receive the “what” during a pivot, they’re naturally going to be frustrated that their hard work now needs to be changed or even discarded.
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PMs are like conductors. Engineers are the actual cellists.
Not true. PMs don't conduct the engineering band. No self-respecting engineer has time to get in a room and praise some useless PM for working weeks to communicate the obvious and take all the credit. Good PMs are innovators and change the world. In ten years, I've met one. Bad PMs hold meetings and write shitty docs. Oh, and they are usually really good at the blame game and exceptional CYA.