Modern product management started in 1931 with a memo written by Neil H. McElroy at Procter & Gamble. It started as a justification to hire more people (sound familiar to any product managers out there?) but became a cornerstone in modern thinking about brand management and ultimately product management. What he laid out in his 800-word memo was a simple and concise description of “Brand Men” and their absolute responsibility for a brand – from tracking sales to managing the product, advertising and promotions. Uniquely he outlined that the way to do this was through thorough field testing and client interaction. TC 300K
🥱🥱🥱🥱 Tell us, wise one: if the role is useless, why does Jeff Bezos employ them in his thrifty company?
Same reason these companies all have “chief diversity officers”
Hca is an idiot. Amazon doesn't have a chief diversity officer.
Useful role. But like everything else it was abused by corporate overlords building fiefdoms. One of the most ridiculous assumptions was that you had to have one PM for a product line which people in tech translated into you need to have 1 PM per feature..
Tf? No it wasn’t. Ur wrong. Read a book.
DEI role
Good Pm game changer. Bad PM massive black hole
You don’t need a PM, you need someone to: 1. Talk to customers to understand their pain points 2. Design the most feasible way to address the problem 3. Explain these to engineers in technical way 4. Work with different teams to get shit unblocked to get the feature live 5. Do all sort of marketing, demos, presentations to explain this to sales, customers etc.. You can call this person anything you want, it’s just industry chose this name to be Product Manager. Now if you tell you don’t need above steps in your business you’re an idiot!
1. Why do we need PMs in teams that only deal with other internal teams and not customers? 2. Not every day you’ll have a new feature. Sometimes a big project will take up 6 months and you’ll barely have customer intervention. 3. If a PM doesn’t know how to design a solution and just works as communication between customer and engineer why not just train engineers to talk to customers? 4. Also if a PM is just asking engineers to do EVERYTHING that a customer wants what’s the PM’s role here? If they’re smartly choosing what to do and what not to do then they have an importance (but most of the time it’s not that way)
1. Because other internal teams can be customers, and you have to convince other teams to work with you 2. Only if you’re a poor PM. For any large feature, customer validation is absolutely a thing. And when customer interaction is lower, there are so many other things that have to get done 3. That would be great, but what free time do engineers have? On top of terrible WLB, they also need to now manage customers? Managing customers can be a full time job in itself. And soft skills aren’t nearly as easy to teach. 4. If a PM does this, they are a bad PM. Good ones prioritize well and throw out the garbage. Bad ones certainly exist
It’s not so much that the role is useless— you’d need someone to decide what features to build, more that most SWEs can do at least a mediocre PM job but not vice versa. I’m a SWE, never been a PM, and I’ve had PM offers (admittedly tier 2 companies) and made it to onsite and post onsite rounds at FAANG++. How many PMs can even pass the SWE phone screen at a shit tier company? Thus even though some aspects of the PM job are necessary, the position itself can be replaced by an astute EM/ sr SWE.
The worst job any woman ever did was to give birth to you