Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?

[yurimhln]

I don't know about you guys but over the last 2 years, I saw A LOT of people with classic commerce, marketing or management training and experience switch to a product management position. Either within the companies they work at or by doing a 1-3 month bootcamp and be hired for a new position. I am the only one to notice this? Is this a good thing?

[solatic]

In a recession, where companies give up on the efficacy of their marketing and sales operations, a lot of those positions get cut. When a company merges or gets acquired (often, to improve financial metrics), that enables the company to cut a lot of marketing and sales positions.

Product is seen as a position that is seen as a bit more stable. The company still sells the product, current and potential users can still be interviewed, feature work still needs to be prioritized for developers, and various executives are loath to take over a position whose workload often feels like a lot of drudgery. So PMs are less likely to get laid off.

With that said, good PMs are worth their weight in gold, and most others are an anchor. When lots of people take some courses and switch to PM positions, well, Product suffers. Smart executives understand this and resist it. Unfortunately, most executives are not so smart... do the math.

[whatever1]

PMs are such a hit or miss. I have not seen an average PM in my career. They either are incredibly talented and they can move mountains out of the way of making a great product, or they are a complete black hole of resources focusing on gantt charts and project updates.

[ian0]

|| When lots of people take some courses and switch to PM positions, well, Product suffers

This mirrors what happened with the rise of coding bootcamps. Another similarity between the two is the whole framework marketing machine.

I think its more related to tech becoming mainstream. A long time ago a lot of the people you met had a genuine interest in computing and then sort of fell into it as a career. Nowadays its fairly well plotted out like other fields, with all the baggage that comes along with that.

[ssag2]

As someone interested in moving into PM, what are some of the things PMs do that make them worth their weight in gold?

[hn_throwaway_99]

I heard a statement before a lot of the big tech layoffs were in full swing: "There were a lot of low-interest rate product managers in tech over the past couple years."

Don't get me wrong, I think product management is actually the hardest job in tech because it can straddle so many different areas: design, marketing, data analysis, customer relationships, project management, etc. etc. I still think great project managers are worth their weight in gold.

That said, I think great product managers are extremely rare, and many (most?) product managers are neutral or negative value adds. Reasons being:

1. Product managers need to be incredibly detail oriented. They should know every in-and-out, every edge condition of their product. I've found this level of detail-oriented-ness to be very rare. It can be one of the biggest causes of friction between engineering and product.

2. The best product managers have a good, basically innate sense of products and features that will work for users. This skill is incredibly rare.

3. I think most importantly, many product managers see themselves more as project managers: keep Jira boards up to date, coordinate with stakeholders, schedule meetings, etc. These types of product managers can do lots of work to look busy, but I'm usually like "yeah, I can schedule my own meetings."

So my point is I'm extremely skeptical of people that can do a 1-3 month boot camp and be good product managers (though, that said, I think the same thing of code bootcamps). I do think there are some "pipelines" to becoming product managers that should be strengthened, as I've seen some very good product managers come from being very detail-oriented and motivated QA or customer service folks.

But in general, I think the time of hoards of useless product managers is coming to an end.

[131012]

Care to give more details about your third point?

[smashah]

The Big Con[0] book touches on this subject.

Essentially, non technical people who want to insert themselves into technical projects account for many of the new PMs we see, at least in consulting, nowadays.

[0] https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-big-con

[pseudotrash]

In security we see the compliance crowd sucking out all the air of the room.

[NickC25]

I get that.

I think that it can be a mixed bag, especially depending on the size of your team and what you're trying to accomplish....and just as important - what role your PM actually fills on a day-to-day basis. PM has evolved to be a very vague description of many different needs a business actually has (some tech, some not) that nobody is specifically doing already.

My own experience as a PM - I worked at an education software startup. I was on a very small team with 3 engineers, a CTO, an operations person, and a CEO who was more of a market development / bizdev type of person. I was made PM almost by default. There was nobody regularly engaging with our users on a regular basis, nobody from our team actually using our product, nobody making sure we were building what we (and our customers) wanted to build, and nobody that understood the competition or the market we were serving. That's the PM role I filled - part tech, part biz, part UX, part design. My main value-add was that I knew the industry (and niche within the industry) well, and had personal experience at both sides of the product from a usecase prespective well before we even built it.

At other companies, this could be a much more limited role, or much greater role depending on the needs of the company.

I'm not super technical but have done coding bootcamps, know the right tech questions to ask, understand what engineers are capable of and how long things take; and most importantly - how to tell non-technical people to stop bothering the technical people. I do think PMs should be able to code, or at least know enough to ask questions, call out BS, know what's possible and what isn't, and how to get non-technical management to stop micro-managing the software development lifecycle. People skills are important too.

As I said earlier, PM has evolved into a catch-all that nobody can quite describe because it fills a slightly different niche at every different organization. The problem just gets worse when you hire fresh grads or people with 1-2 years of consulting experience who don't have any background whatsoever.

[rchaud]

Seems like the technical hiring process is to blame if just anyone can waltz in and start planning sprints.

[kerblang]

Product owner/manager often works out fine as an informal position, where certain people in leadership roles are making decisions because they have an excellent aptitude for doing such; they especially have the ability to understand and empathize with their user base.

That works fine until it stops working, and then it works horribly, because engineers have asserted themselves as antagonistic product owners: I know what customers want! And they just plain don't. Things can go completely insane. It boggles my mind how badly some otherwise competent folks can botch this.

I didn't even realize how important this role was until I was working with people who clearly had no business asserting themselves into it, and I'd rather have someone less technical doing it than an engineer who is awful at it.

[dasil003]

You're calling out one specific failure mode: engineering speaking for product (and possibly design, research, data science, etc). But that's just one of many, and in my experience product speaking for engineering is more common and more dangerous. It can lead to complete gridlock and dead sea effect over time if it goes uncorrected.

[mountainriver]

> And they just plain don't. Things can go completely insane. It boggles my mind how badly some otherwise competent folks can botch this.

This hit home with me, I’ve seen some of the smartest engineers fall into this trap. They seem to believe their great engineering skills translate directly to product management.

It can be one of the worst possible outcomes for a product and company

[alphazard]

People like to point to shining examples of Product Managers adding huge amounts of value. They are like Unicorns, and you will probably never encounter one in your career. Moreover, many companies are unable to setup a hiring pipeline that can reliably detect such individuals. So hiring for the role Product Manager is a net negative for most companies, because their odds of hiring a good one are basically 0.

The result is that Product Manager is mostly an imposter role. It's created by charismatic "business" people to insert themselves into an area of value creation. They are attracted to the light and heat that tech has been giving off. Once they are in, they promulgate the idea that the role is absolutely necessary for success and create more demand for hiring similar imposter roles. The necessity of these roles is now part of the conventional wisdom.

As an imposter role, anyone well liked, with enough confidence can pivot into it. Areas with clear metrics for success like demand generation have seen cuts. But the success of a product manager is more difficult to quantify, and so it's a good place to jump to.

[kirso]

How is it difficult? Each product has a metric / OKRs behind it and if it doesn't then something is really really wrong.

Can hardly see an argument of everyone pivoting based on loudness and charisma. People would usually fail here on analytics, design or even technical questions of data flows.

[kevroy314]

We really struggle to find good PMs. I've noticed a proliferation of low quality PMs (they don't really understand the product; they just act ask a secretary for technical leads and/or users). In particular, I wish we had more opinionated, less passive PMs.

[alphazard]

Hiring in the open market is unlikely to get you good PMs. It's too easy to hire an imposter, who doesn't or can't understand the problem and solution domains. The best talent pool would be engineers at your company who are looking to transition.

The best product managers are engineers who care about what customers think, and have enough soft skills to talk to them. Even selecting from that pool, it's likely they will add less value as a PM vs as an engineer. In the case of hiring internally, at least they can fallback to being an engineer. Compare that to an imposter from the open market with poor domain knowledge, and no technical skills.

[uglygoblin]

This has predominantly been my experience over the years. A great a PM is worth their weight in gold though!

[p1esk]

"opinionated" is the last thing you want in a PM. PM's job is to listen to users, and collect data.

[idopmstuff]

Not something I've noticed, and honestly even if it is the case, there's a limit to the number of PMs out there just given that there's a practical minimum ratio of PMs to engineers.

With tech seeing layoffs and a drive for efficiency, right now we're definitely seeing the number of PM spots decrease. Also, in times of cost cutting, you can drive the ratio of engineers to PMs up - I just listened to Zuckerberg on Lex Friedman, and he said they had a ratio of ~3 reports to one manager before they started layoffs, and he wanted that to more than double. He was talking more about engineering management there, but I have to imagine the PM ratio would be similar.

[johnzimmerman]

This is something I think about a lot as a product manager (PdM). There is only 1 PdM per a handful of engineers. In some cases, a product manager has more than one product (and team). From a numbers standpoint, I often wonder if I'd be better off going back to engineering. I wasn't the best at writing code—I was slow—but I enjoyed the challenges. The grass is always greener, I suppose.

[erdos4d]

I have another question: why does a PM make more than a dev? My wife made that jump and her salary went up 50%. She literally just goes to meetings and talks now, yet she makes more than her old job that required real skills. Am I the only person who finds this perverse?

[ian0]

Because at the end of the day its whether your shipping something worthwhile that matters. Not how much you code, nor the brain farts of execs.

Paying for someone who can increase the efficiency of a bunch of other highly paid people is a sound investment. Not that this happens often in reality! A shit show is a shit show even with a paid cat-herder. But it can work very well given the right circumstances.

[aikinai]

In most companies, PMs make roughly the same as engineers at the same level, so your wife’s situation likely has other factors. Did she make the jump to another company? If so, that’s why, not the ladder switch.

Also, PM requires real skills too, as you can see from a lot of the comments here. Unfortunately most PMs don’t have those skills, so I don’t blame people who don’t know that.

[dasil003]

This is far from universally true. If it's junior dev to PM then it makes sense you are defining the work of large swathes of people. That said, one of my pet peeves is junior PMs because the role requires significant skill, expertise, judgement and maturity. If you're just talking in meetings you're doing it wrong.

[iExploder]

a good PM or Manager has much higher value than a good coder. the problem is to be a good PM or Manager in tech you need not only good soft skills but also strong technical background. a lot of people in positions dont have either.

[throwawaypx]

It's the same everywhere. Talking is more profitable than doing anything

[deepzn]

There was another post a while ago, that showed how all the money in Tech was gathering people from all other professions like Finance, Law, etc. And that's how tech workforces ballooned in the last decade, and exploded during the pandemic. Now a lot of that is being dialed down, with cost controls.

But, it's a result of where the money lies. And has been done in industries and periods past. Tech realized that every company needs to be honing their product strategy, it's not cool that your tech is awesome, but you need sell it. I think this group structure is more useful than the legacy agile/ with a scrum master model. PMs can steer the ship and handle all the roles of a business analyst, scrum master, and to some degree maybe even merge with an engineering manager (might be going towards that), but perhaps it was a good idea to separate engineering and product/business decisions.

[chadash]

In my experience, product management is an innate skill that is very hard to learn or teach. This is not to say that you can’t get better at it, just that it doesn’t involve the sorts of skills that are easy to teach in a classroom, it is more about real world experience. In order to be good at it, you need to be well organized, good at talking to people, have a good intuition for design, and a strong ability to understand the domain you are working in, as well as your users.

The best product managers I know seem to have a natural talent for it. And plenty of them found their way into it by accident. Maybe they were working in another part of the business, but realized that they had a knack for understanding how the product could be better. Maybe someone told them that they would be good at it.

My take on it is that yes, lots of people want to be involved in tech, but don’t know how to code. Product management is a Way to do that that’s accessible to non-engineers. Some people will try it out and find that they have strong abilities at it, and many will fail at it. But I think it is seen as a desirable job.

That said, I think it’s an incredibly hard job as well. You have to deal with people above you constantly pushing on deadlines, you have to stay super on top of things, and you won’t succeed, unless you earn the respect of the engineers you work with. It can be very demanding. Most people don’t seem to have the skill set for it. And if you are in a company with a bad culture, it can be a very thankless job.

[piva00]

Basically my experience as well, what I'd like to add is that the best product managers I've ever worked with had good taste and also an intuition to balance good taste with the constraints of where they are working at, both market and company.

On the other hand I've seen atrocious data-oriented PMs which get so hyper-focused on metrics that completely lose the sense of taste, their vision is completely clouded by whatever KPIs they want to reach, lacking the ability to re-assess those metrics if they get in the way of making a good product. Some products don't see a change in metrics easily, it might accrue over time and only a strong, enduring vision can get business people over that hump.

[glasss]

This is a little scary to see as someone who is trying to switch industries and get into a product owner / manager position.

My background is very technical, but it's in the traditional IT industry and I doubt anyone would trust me to start writing code even though that's what I've been doing for the past 2 years. So I figured with my project management experience I can jump more easily to product management.

From my perspective it does seem like there are still a lot of roles open for product people, so I can understand why it seems like a lot of people are trying to jump.

[Eumenes]

Its an avenue for developers who don't want to code anymore and want to play scrum master. Prob 1/3rd of early career engineers are trying to get out of developer jobs into PM gigs.

[fatnoah]

My current company has a lot of domain experts from a specific industry that became product managers. It's been a mixed bag of results. They're obviously very knowledgable about the market we serve, but completely naive to the process of making software products. Clarity and appropriate levels of detail in requirements definitions and creating coherent "products" vs. clumps of features are the biggest challenges.

Fortunately, all are willing to learn and work together to figure it out.

[idopmstuff]

I've seen this happen, and it can definitely work, but only if you've got someone really focused on training the PM skills. A PM who both has the core skillset and domain expertise is awesome, but trying to just drop someone in because they have domain expertise without the skills for the job itself generally turns out how you're describing.

In my view the most practical thing to do, if you can swing it, is to have a subject matter expert who's just a general resource for everybody. They help product make decisions about what to build, marketing with how to message and sales with closing the deals. We just brought somebody on in this capacity at my company, which is a startup in a highly regulated industry, and it's honestly just a dream setup for me as a PM. Things that would take me a lot of research or experimentation to figure out instead get answered in a 30 minute call.

[zztop44]

I wish! I suspect I’d be good at it, but I have no idea how to get a PM job as a mid-career person with no useful network. I have 10 years experience in marketing, project/team management in nonprofits (good network in that industry) and a few years experience writing code too as a freelancer (but with some decent size projects and clients).

Admittedly, I haven’t tried too hard because the freelance work is very comfortable, but every time Ive applied for a PM role it’s been a total bust.

[0x008]

In times like these, when there is so much opportunity and so many use cases are easily recognizable due to the AI hype and so much information going around, anyone can be a product manager. When the tides turn and we enter the next AI winter, lots of these product managers will move on or be cut.

It's very easy to be a product manager in times like these, it's not easy being one where opportunity is rare and hard to find.

[meerita]

I became a product manager by accident while working as a lead designer. I developed a fondness for taking ownership of the product. At that time, I was also an engineer. Presently, I work as a CTO, and I have noticed that many product managers lack the necessary skills in engineering or design. Individuals from backgrounds such as Business Analysis, Marketing, or other managerial roles often excel as CEOs of a product.

[awelxtr]

What is a PM?

I'm told I am one. Because I am the manager of a piece of software the CTO has passed on to me.

Besides leading the develoment, what should I do?

[ecmascript]

It's an easy way of getting paid more while doing less actual work. Obviously most senior people want to become product managers since they know they will have more to say and get compensated for it.

[JasserInicide]

Managing people is where the real money is vs. say, straight programming

[jdlshore]

Product management isn’t (or shouldn’t be) a people management position. It’s a cross between inbound marketing, product design, and high-level prioritization/planning.

Done well, it’s essential to creating products people love. Unfortunately, it’s easy to do poorly. Done poorly, it looks like bad project management: shuffling Gantt charts and micromanaging engineers.

[candiddevmike]

Those who can, code; those who can't, tell people what to code.

[gtk40]

While as a product owner I'm not primarily a people leader (although I do) I got a significant pay bump switching from a lead engineer to a product owner at my company.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Most product managers don't have direct reports.

[rizzaxc]

this is not true in my experience. they are often 1 or 2 paygrades (literally) below engineers, controlled for ranks