Backstory: I joined my current software dev company (20-man now 16-ish) about 10 months ago as a ‘trainee’ with no CS background. After 3 months of bouncing between legal/marketing/research, I was moved to Product Development, and have stayed there since.
Apparently, I’ve been doing a decent job and was ‘promoted’ to Product Manager in December (although I was the first actual Product hire) and been asked to fill the Project Manager role on top of the PM role in April, which I’ve been training for with the departing Project Manager for the past 2 months.
So as fellow Product Managers, how would you go about that? Considering that you’d also be expected to be heavily involved in getting things done as a Project Manager/ Scrum Master.
– Mario Romero
Discussion
A] I got my start in product working in a small startup, maybe I can try and provide some perspective.
Given your background, lack of experience as a PM, and the size of the company you’re at, you’ve really been given an opportunity to learn a few roles with valuable skill sets.
I think that you’ll have a hard time moving to a PM role at another company right now (will be much less of a problem in 6-12 months of you performing in the role you’ve been given now).
If that’s the case, you’re probably not in much of a position to negotiate your wage much higher. At startups, more than anywhere else, your price is determined by what people are willing to pay you. However, you have been handed tremendous value to build your skill set, resume, and jump-start your PM career.
– Cathryn Cui
B] Excellent advice and I wanted to add: your rate is the highest someone in the market is willing to pay you. If you think you can get more elsewhere, find a competing offer.
Do you want to be in product management long term? If so, then as @CathrynCui mentioned this is an excellent opportunity to learn, show value, and build your resume. Build up your skill set enough to grow your market value above your current pay (i.e., the ability to take your skills to another company).
– Risa Butler
C] In terms of opportunity and where I’ll be in 6-12 months, I completely agree. Career-wise, I’m confident I’m on the right path.
My primary concern is that I do not have much-negotiating power, because (1) I’m based in a very small country where there are only a handful of tech companies/startups, and (2) the company I’m at is the largest and the best at mobile app development.
Also, I guess on a personal level, it’d be nice if the ‘good jobs’ were being matched with some sort of ‘material’ compensation, as a token of genuineness (if that makes sense).
And I feel like because of this, (a) I’m not doing as much as I could to help the company thrive, which is slowing down my growth, since it’s harder to care, and (b) I’m not receiving more responsibilities, which I’m looking for, since they feel like they are getting enough bang for their buck.
I went about the ‘raise’ issue in January and requested clear KPIs to keep my salary prospect’s objective and to gauge how much the bosses would take advantage of that lack of competition. In return, I was given some broad goals like ‘replace the PM’ and ‘implement agile methodologies’, nothing quantitative, and was told to be patient.
In terms of the ‘money’, I don’t need it right now. So, the plan (due to the covid stuff), might just be the bite of the bullet and just leech as much value as I can from this opportunity.
Software PMs… I’m about 6 months into my first PM job. how do you get involved/engage with your devs more? I feel like I have no work to do 70% of the time.
Our Team: A Scrum Master, BA, PM/PO (me), and 8 Devs (4 Android, 4 iOS), 1 API dev, 1 Devops, 1QA Tester, 1QA Automation Engineer.
We run all our scrum ceremonies and are all involved where needed from daily standup to backlog prioritization (no devs here), Sprint planning, Retrospectives, etc. We’ve got good chemistry as a team and get along well, and I am fully present. participating, guiding/leading and answering questions in these meetings.
However, when tickets go to developers it’s like the work goes into a black hole until it comes to me for review from QA.
How can I help more? Get involved more? Without micromanaging or seeming like I’m hovering over their shoulders? What else can I do to support the developers? Scrum Master is really involved in pushing the tickets along through pull requests, all sorts of other downstream checks and testing. BA owns analytics, and wireframes (I am involved here somewhat in strategic planning and direction) but she works directly with all the devs to ensure this stuff is functional and the best method to move forward.
I basically create epics and stories by getting requirements from stakeholders, managing the wireframes process, pushing some paper along, updating the big wigs multiple times a week, working with the BA and Scrum Master, and wondering what my role is with the devs. A lot of the time during the sprints I feel like I am doing no work.
Edit: Vision, Strategy and Road mapping of the product, are out of my scope. My organization is massive. Feature request comes in, we build it. That’s it.
All thoughts are welcome!
– Vlad Podpoly
Discussion
A] I believe a product manager’s role should not be about getting more involved in tickets, particularly as it sounds like you have good Scrum Master and QA roles already, you should be looking to the future!
It sounds like right now you just take requests from someone senior and ask developers to do that. This is understandable when starting in a junior role, but you need to set yourself on a path away from this where you are a driving force into how your product evolves. If you don’t you will quickly run into the problem of being a feature delivery team that just keeps adding one more button to solve a particular client’s problem and you will not gain the experience required to move into more senior roles.
I would encourage you to constantly dive deep into the why behind these requests, if they are quoting clients or prospects then request you speak to the clients directly about this problem. This why should be clearly communicated on tickets you create so everyone has this context. Informed developers and designers will create much better solutions and will often surprise you with innovative suggestions when they understand the underlying motivations. Try speaking to as many clients as possible, focus on the problems they face and what they are trying to achieve in their jobs rather than “what is one feature you wish we had”. Over time you will be able to pick our recurring themes.
Try to pair this with usage metrics and think about how you plan to measure how impactful new features are and what you hope to learn.
Also try to better understand your company and product strategy (if you have one).
I would try to develop this understanding these individual elements and how they connect as much as possible. As you do this, it will be very valuable for your team if you can condense and translate this large amount of knowledge into their language.
All of this should start feeding into prioritization which is ultimately one of the most critical roles for a PM.
With these tools you will gain confidence over time to push back against simply fulfilling stakeholder requests and be able to communicate why you should be focusing elsewhere or solving their problem differently from their expectations in order to build a more impactful product.
Good Luck!
– Dhiraj Mehta
B] This is an outstanding answer.
In general, it sounds like OP is the writer on a movie set. Once the devs start working, the PM should be available to provide answers to questions, but the majority of work should be done already.
I would add two areas of focus to this answer:
User feedback – there is no more valuable decision maker than your end user (and an end user doesn’t need to be a real-world customer, in case you work on an internal product; it’s whoever consumes your user stories). If end users tell you something directly, it is incredibly valuable in helping to drive decisions. Is there a user feedback channel you can plug into and incorporate into your story writing?
Future looking – I have worked as a dev and a PM, and it is really challenging to switch contexts, so devs need a good PM who can look ahead and see the landscape and keep the ship pointing in the right direction, continually getting buy off from management. Try to get as many stories groomed and in the backlog as is reasonable.
But more than anything else, I think the biggest area that PMs can work on is demonstrating a share of the workload. In general, devs live in the weeds, and if all they see from PMs is when they swoop in with new requirements every now and again, it can feel like the PMs are not sharing the workload. So, demonstrating that you are doing your part such as having a robust road map, providing feedback whenever possible, either from you or the customer, being ultra-responsive to questions, or just doing morale-building stuff like going on coffee/lunch runs or whatever can really help out a lot.
Is it just me or is product management becoming a cringe field? Especially on LinkedIn and Twitter. You know the type. Generic tech bro wannabe “thought leaders” endlessly circle-jerking themselves about frameworks and strategies discussed in the latest business self-help book. Most discussions about product management are about how product management is such a “hot field” and discussing why product management is so awesome rather than discussing product strategy itself. It often strikes me as a deeply “bullshit” field in the technical sense of meaningless corporate jobs (see the book “Bullshit Jobs”.) Sometimes it seems there are more product managers building products/schemes to help product managers get into the field of product management than there are actual product managers.
These “thought leaders” listen to Tim Ferris and every other productivity guru and fancy themselves the next Steve Jobs, or Marty Cagan. Yet these high-flying theories are usually just bullshit idealism that never gets actually implemented in the real world, which is much more messy and human than some idealized PM framework that I’ve never actually seen actually implemented except insofar as there is some hollow mechanical shell for “going through the motions.”
Product management is the new “agile” (or worse, SAFE). It’s often empty, meaningless hype driven by consultants and schools and the cottage industry of courses, books, and certificate programs.
Let’s be real with ourselves. We are not the heroes of the narrative. We are not the CEOs.
Lest you think I am too pessimistic, we are not irrelevant. There is value in the role of the modern PM. But can we not be so cringe in thinking ourselves as these deep strategists saving the company? Almost all the value of the PM comes from being a SME and a good communicator, rather than some expert on “product strategy.” Marty Cagan is selling a luxury, not a day-to-day reality for most PMs.
I recognize the tone of this rant is a little harsh. And I’m being slightly tongue-in-cheek.
But I feel like there is a silent majority of product managers who don’t work in FAANG companies that treat PMing as just another corporate gig, not some Savior role. I would be nothing without my dev teammates, but my devs would probably get on pretty well without me. That gives me a real sense of humility I see lacking in so much PM discourse online.
– Shiyao Liu
Discussion
A] I don’t – and would never – call myself a thought leader. In addition to being a PM, however, I also coach PMs, do product consulting, post on LinkedIn, and I’m currently working on a PM book. I do all this because I genuinely love product management and haven’t yet tired of it after seven years. I love thinking about how to do it better myself and especially love helping other people get into or get better at it.
You’re right that there’s a steep mountain of shit to climb out there. A difficult pill for me to swallow is that no matter what I do, many people will see me as a wannabe thought leader. (Even though my brand is sort of anti “ideal-thought-leader”: all my materials focus on what the product is actually like and how to navigate, say, being asked to build a team strategy by a VP who has no strategy. The Simon Sineks of the world saying shit like “Good companies take care of their employees” and getting 30K upvotes can, frankly, go away.)
The sad truth, though, is that there’s no way to get your ideas out there without being active on social media and hyping yourself up. You have to play the game, even if you have the best of intentions. What makes that rewarding is when I hear that my blog helped someone, or someone reaches out to me to ask about getting into the product.
– Dhiraj Mehta
B] I’m right there with you. I love this gig, and I’m a lifer, but I hate the meta-discourse around it. A lot of this bullshit is a function of PM becoming very highly paid, very selective, and not requiring hard engineering skills anymore – and the tech field (even in FAANG) being less demanding of absurd hours culture than IB, consulting, or pro services.
So, you get those people. The Ivy League > 3 years at McKinsey > MBA > PM path. The IB exits. The tiger-mom insecure overachiever bullshit artists. Not the people who are fascinated with complex systems, or who love tech, or who want to spend their days building / enabling the building of cool shit (why I got into it), but the people who want to use it as the new cool springboard to a CXO job.
Stuff would 100% get done without me, and fundamentally my job day to day is a shit umbrella to protect the engineers and designers from nonsense and to guide the narrative. I’m not indispensable. Good PM makes a difference because we’re ideally the correct mix of technical and emotional intelligence to straddle the engineering and operational sides of the business, understand customer pain, and focus UX / Engineering on the most important problems.
That’s it. We’re not geniuses, 99% of the frameworks are bullshit, and the Marty Cagan perfect dreamworld doesn’t really exist. I mean, look at the companies he worked at.
eBay? AOL? HP? I worked for HP as a consultant across multiple prod/dev functions.
They were so legacy and so backward it’s hard to put into words. It is absolutely impossible that the utopias he describes exist at Hewlett-Packard.
The overnight success is a myth that has been thoroughly debunked over recent years, especially as it applies to tech. Knowing this, it’s still hard not to think of Product Hunt as an overnight success given how rapidly it spread throughout Silicon Valley.
Practically all major product launches are now posted to Product Hunt. In fact, the product’s makers are almost always present as well, commenting in real time with everyone else. From the outside, Product Hunt’s rise felt like magic.
This post is meant to build empathy for product managers, and to understand their world just a bit better. I’ve focused on the hard stuff, so don’t expect too many feel-good stories. Don’t assume these are universal, but always be on the lookout for ways to connect more deeply with their challenges (and turn those challenges into opportunities for progress). Empathy goes a very long way.
Product management, like “business development” and “UX” means many different things depending on the organization. But it does feel like the overall field is advancing in sophistication and self-awareness.
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