Thoughts on PMs and middle management “useless” rhetoric?
I’m seeing heightened sentiment on Blind that product managers and “middle managers” are useless. Some specifically note that their alleged uselessness is a result of the MBA’fication of tech. I’m interested in peoples genuine, in-depth opinions on this concept. ——— I’ll share mine, if that’s alright. I generally agree with the sentiment, but with some depth. In a mature company, such as Discover, every single function has a single manager, if not a group of managers, “running” it. Then, each manager tends to have analysts, system support specialists, process owners, et. al. under them. Then, each manager reports up to a senior manager, which runs a product or a portfolio of functions. If the senior manager owns a product, such as an internal tool that our agents use, they’re unofficially called a product manager. Each senior manager has product owners, scrum masters, and project managers that report to them. Then, under a separate set of managers and senior managers will the actual designers, engineers, and other build roles such as writing actually report up to a department’s director. While this system establishes clear DRIs for every task under the sun, it also contributes to an unbelievable amount of bureaucracy, soloing, and thus duplicative work. You start to question if with half the “management” you could could work faster and better. The work I do is currently being duplicated by three other departments at my company. This structure, many times over, also leads to top-down, HiPPO decisions that dramatically reduce the quality of our deliverables. As a designer, I’m told to build something a very certain way because a Director has a “hunch” and wants it like that. We have a name for it, SAFe. It isn’t really “agile” at all. However, the most efficient team I worked in only had a highly visible product manager at the helm, with a couple *shared* organizational resources like UX researchers, product marketers, and a chief of staff. No product owners, program managers, scrum masters, analysts, or project managers. My people manager had 15 other reports, and he reported directly to the Director. His focus was professional development, training, and driving on initiatives like documentation or delivery time. We shipped fast and iterated frequently. Designers and engineers were empowered to make impactful decisions. Product managers still did GTM+PMF, but also spoke with customers, reviewed support tickets, owned/tracked OKRs, and managed backlogs/sprints on a weekly basis. ——— TL;DR: I’ve seen tremendous value in the extreme ownership model for a PM, and I think adding any more complexity to that increases costs, bureaucracy, and mediocrity. I see product managers say managing a sprint or backlog isn’t their job, that talking to customers/sales/marketing/support isn’t their job… I think it should be. Am I wrong? Probably! But I simply think it’s foolish to eliminate middle/product managers altogether; I just see these roles evolving and becoming much more lean. Sure, many engineers can (and have) successfully lead businesses, but I think we should focus our work weeks on where we can make the most impact. #middlemanagement #productmanagement
I totally agree with the sentiment that most managers and product/program managers are useless. We can definitely perform with 10-20% of them and only if they are useful and bring any skills to the table. I am not against managers and product/program managers but more often than not, pretty much 90% of them have no skills and just don’t contribute anything. They pull the team down with useless meetings and politics.
Managers are basically overheads for the IT industry where IC's are educated enough to self-manage. Product and Program Managers are required for coordination. Managers on the other hand basically performs tasks pertaining to sr executive communication and people management. Budget allocation is done by executives.
I think middle managers and PMs can be useful. I've done both roles in my time. I found that red tape and stupid processes kept me from being effective. Especially in the PM role. There's so much governance and it's so hard to gain alignment. It became more about making power points than getting things accomplished, which really frustrated me.
That’s how it is here, with the added pain of it being finance. A PM will ship maybe one notable thing a year and just self-promote the heck out of it for internal clout.
Project/product/program management experience is worth very little without the specific technical knowledge of the field one is trying to “manage” and there are way too many PMs that just don’t get it. At the same time they are afraid to step back and let the experts get the job done without their useless input. Some good PMs exist but most are just in it to perpetuate their own little cottage industry of buzzwords, extraneous meetings, and indecipherable smart sheets.
Love that cottage industry point.
In my limited experience, their input/productivity to the team is 20-30% relatively. I think they are supposed to act mainly as lubricant. You need little bit of it. You don’t overwhelm the machine with grease!
Good analogy!
Awesome analogy.
A strong PM is worth their weight in platinum. A good manager is rare in tech. If you have one, enjoy every day you can. What you describe OP often brings up Conway's Law: a company tends to design systems that mimic their org chart. You can use to your advantage when interviewing: steer clear of orgs like your first example where possible, and look for orgs that look like your second example.
This. The challenge is that evaluating a good pm in interviews may be difficult, I’ve seen too many incompetent politicians in these roles that seriously hurt the company. But they sweet talk their way to power. Good ones otoh can be super valuable. I don’t think the question is PM vs no PM, but selecting good vs bad ones.
While I was at Microsoft, I never met one good PM and there are so many PMs at Microsoft.
At metaphysical level, There are only two kind of work - Innovation and Imitation. When you are truly innovating, managers are dead weight, no one has any idea of what can be done. Like 2000s - no one ever imagined how computers and internet will take off and change everything. Every one was busy building something fundamentally different. Managers were supposed to be only supporting role in this environment. Today, the IT industry is the new banking industry. Everyone is copying stuff from other. There is nothing fundamental different on the so called new products. People are getting excited about iPhone increasing camera pixels and Android adding pink to Home Screen. Everyone has got handle of scalability and things are in imitation stage. Here, managers are very important. They are needed to keep engineers in check - talk about budget, cost cutting, serious work and less play. Until we move to real paradigm change like Quantum , Robotics really taking off and Space Travel, the innovation is going to be incremental, growth will be incremental and happy days of IT will be sunsetting. Is this first time such a phenomenon happening? No, in 1920s fanciest job was being a butcher, 1980s being a banker was cool, 2000s an IT engineer - who know what next 30 years will bring. Managers will always exist - they are like cockroaches . Can’t remove them how much you hate them. (I am a manager)
Love this perspective, thank you
गाँव बसा, फिर लुटेरे आए - literally translates to “once village is developed, bandits arrive to steal”. Totally agree. Managers are like bandits. Once poor hard workers build something awesome these bandits see the things they have and come to steal. Not really a new concept, isn’t it.
Good PMs and EMs are well-aligned, clearly understand their responsibilities, and make sure they don't step on others' toes & leave their egos at the doorstep. When it comes to EMs especially, really good EMs understand Technologies, Business Needs, and People management very well & know how to marry them. Bad EMs & PMs, on the other hand, constantly step on other people's shoes, playing petty politics and keeping people under their thumb using fear. In general, at least in tech, there needs to be better training and a well-structured system that lays out the responsibilities and trains either ICs becoming managers or non-tech background folks to function in a tech company as effective managers. There needs to be a way we can align people while giving them autonomy. Until that problem is solved, we will keep seeing posts like this.
Agreed!
Where are those good managers and PMs?
I agree with OP mostly. I feel like that middle, mostly made of marshmallow layer is that way because someone tried to solve a problem with a here, you do this, solution and didn’t follow through to actually determine how well it jelled with the rest of the system, much less, did it actually add to something worthwhile to the end result. Or did they just end up adding fluff with no real substance. Because, like the OP related, when it is done well, it just made things better.
One thing I’ll add, many of the delightful PMs I worked with transitioned into the role from a design background. Many of the meh or bad ones were from a business background. This, of course, is anecdotal.
Agree with this. When I was at Microsoft, my designers were contributing so much. They were a better PM than the useless PM. So engineers would just discuss with designers bypassing the PMs.