Terrible and amazing Product Managers
This thread is to help current and future PM's. Don't post unoriginal jokes about how PM's are useless, blah blah blah. Want your PM's to be better? Post something meaningful. Dear non-PM's, what are your war stories. In your experience what are traits you've seen from terrible and amazing PM's? What made you feel that way? What did they do? What do you wish all PM's should know? Make sure to post your role. Advice from an engineer is going to be different from a marketer. #product #productmanagement
Honestly, if u don’t have technical capacity it’s a no from me
PMs get criticized more because they have more responsibility and their job is to make high impact decisions that’s why they are more noticeable. There are way too many bad engineers, analysts, designers and pretty much everyone whose job is less visible.
Also because people only see portion of what PM is doing and measure them against that. Some engineers think that the job of PM is writing tickets, which is very far from reality.
Worked with many PMs, had one great PM, a few good ones, and many useless, and even parasitic PMs. Never had an amazing one. My former manager, who is very senior, very effective, and has over 25 years experience at Microsoft, once advised me never to rely on PMs, but try to benefit from whatever they are willing and able to do. He wisely never let PMs define his product, as he actually was capable of doing that himself (admittedly not all devs are, but neither are most PMs). Yet he still worked well with very senior PMs out of political necessity. To most PMs: don't delude yourself, we see through all your BS (including the BS you believe in), we are aware of your insincerity, we can tell when you have no idea what you're talking about including the product you claim to own, we can easily gauge your lack of interest. Yes, we are as patronizing to you as you are to us, but ours comes from disgust with your abilities and effort rather than your sense that engineers are subhuman geeks who can't be trusted to deal with humans (and didn't even belong to a frat). Great PM: really smart, put in a little effort, engaged, and interested in the product. Made impact, presented well to others, championed the product to upper mgmt. Typical PMs: intellectually lazy, work as little as possible, talk big, deliver little, claim credit for devs hard work, great at CYA, prefer to kill a good product rather than take any risk. One last thing (for most PMs): no, you're not the next Steve Jobs.
Take this with a grain of salt, MS is known for very weak Product team, it has nothing to do with PMs in general. What your boss does is the reason great PMs don't accept MS offers, no PM wants a role where they have to constantly fight with the dev team on top of discovery and problem solving. I thought there were changes in recent years, as MS is finally releasing some good products, so I imagine some teams were able to build the right relationships. Also your idea that PMs think of engineers as subhumans is ridiculous and projects your own insecurities, though I have seen examples of this, it's not some shared sentiment, just some crappy people.
I think you've misunderstood. My manager was very good at getting useful things out of useful PMs. But he had realistic expectations, and would not allow a PM to endanger the product. Good PMs loved working with us, and vice versa. But these were few. As for the rest of your comment, I won't make any ad hominem attacks on your character, but I did enjoy yours on mine LOL. I've actually heard PMs make the most uninformed and patronizing comments like the ones I mentioned about devs, as well as some accurate ones. It's a cultural / psychological divide, two solitudes. But ignore this at your peril, I really don't care.
I try to make sure that the dev teams I work with get the recognition they deserve. Depending on the size of the release, I do some baked goods. Shield them from political bs. In return, they help me become slightly more technical and validate any train of thought.
Wonder why all questions on "how to be a great PM" are addressed to engineers, rather than other PMs, on Blind.
Because they are not created by PMs.