"This tool 10x the productivity of software engineers"
"GREAT! That means we can fire the people who do the actual work, and replace them with MBA robots, who neither understand nor care about making a good product"
Pardon my pessimism, but in my whole career, I have never met a PM who actual did the work of driving the product vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling information between management, marketing, design, and engineering. Thinking that hiring more PMs would increase the output in the age of AI is such a childish fantasy.
I have worked with a few PMs that have been significant helps to my job but LLMs have completely destroyed my ability to work with them. "Oh I asked an AI to put together a demo for this idea and I presented it to leadership. When can you have it finished?" This is now a constant refrain, with LLMs seemingly convincing every PM I know that it is trivial to put together a reliable and maintainable system. "Oh let's just launch this and we'll fast follow with the maintainable infrastructure" and I want to blow my brains out.
The PM discipline has unfortunately maldeveloped as a place for souless MBAs, engineering degree holders who dont want to be engineers or both. Actual Product people are a small minority
Its a tragedy as its undervalued - I firmly believe apples products are significantly worse if their engineers led it. Jobs made those products
I suspect what you are really lamenting is the effects of poor leadership that does not grant a "product manager" (which is really a misnomer) the authority and autonomy to be a "product manager".
As you imply, that role is really more a director role, not a manager role. A manager managers, a director directs, including the vision and product market fit. Most Product Managers I see do not have that authority at all, and at best are constantly having to convince "leadership" like some door-to-door salesman, rather than simply updating leadership in an advise and consent format.
As a Product Manager (not Program or Project), this has been my lived experience of the devolution of the profession.
We want PMs to understand the market, the tech, the customer, and the economic value of building a product.
We then ask them to tell us when it will be built, down to the discrete feature and function, be a technical expert for the field and engineering in the product space, ask them to convey the roadmap and timeline to customers and prospects, build reports about everything from utilization to capacity, save deals by changing timelines for “just this one feature”, participate in product marketing, and understand how their product space co-exists in the complex product offerings from a company.
“You are the Chief Product Officer for your product!” is the promise and rallying cry. That’s not an accurate description of what most PMs do and even fewer are capable of doing.
Yeah, when I read it (probably a decade ago now) it was remarkable how much of the advice was still applicable. If you (yes, you reader) haven't read it before you should do so. It's only 200 pages or so, mostly short articles so it's not a difficult read.
> Most were just middlemen shuttling information between management, marketing, design, and engineering.
well, in my experience as a developer integration between different systems with different views about how things should work is often the most challenging part of the job, so what you describe sounds like it would be difficult.
In my experience PMs often work at a very high level. How things shold work are defined in a incosistent way when we take into account all the user flows, subtelness and restrictions of other systems. So programmers end up doing a significant chunk of the work by refining the specs so that the thing actually makes sense.
I am sorry you've had only negative experiences. Most of mine with PMs were negative as well, but a good one is a dragon slayer and bottleneck unclogger. They feel not like your manager, but like your servant, listening to exactly what you need, relaying messages accurately from other teams of what they need from you, and with the big picture perspective required for you not just to fulfill the task, but do it in a long-term strategically productive way.
> never met a PM who actual did the work of driving the product vision
I have a couple times, but they didn't have an MBA. Unfortunately though if you have an incompetent C suite or board, it's hard to get anything meaningful done no matter how good the team under them is.
"I have never met an engineer who actually did the work of driving the engineering vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling data between servers, disks, clients, and CPUs."
You seem to have a deep misunderstanding of the value PM's provide. What you describe as "just" is a challenging job.
Generally, the vision is set by the founder, and it can be written down in a sentence or two. There's a ton of work trying to translate that vision into something that is coherent across engineers, customers, sales, and marketing.
Deeply flawed analogy. Engineers operate in the same organizational structure as PMs.
Also, in product feature teams it is up to the debate whether PMs provide any value, if you put engineers closer to customers. For the PM role to work, they need to convey customer requirements to product requirements. I have never seen a PM do a better job at this in comparison to just sending a TL to a video call with a client.
I have had a bad time with PMs and UX designers not actually understanding how the product works _right now_. How can you ask for changes if you don't understand how it works currently?
Like I am saying how the current behavior of the app downright needs a big flowchart to explain and I get asked: "Add X, but keep it working for all existing users" when that means the whole freaking flowcharts needs to be redrawn from scratch. When I suggest to remove some things to make things simpler (because the users don't understand it either) I get denied because it would be too much hassle to communicate the changes.
Coding as such is seldom a bottleneck to begin with. How many times have you been in a conversation along the lines of "we have every detail of the product figured out, but we need another month for the coders to finish writing the code"?
The bottlenecks are almost always elsewhere. Design, quality assurance and debugging, art assets, localizations, hiring, performance management, you name it. And to be fair, AI can streamline some of that.
I am struggling to understand your perspective. In my existence, the bottleneck is always the coding.
The development team has a backlog that could keep them busy for years. Meanwhile, everyone else -- QA, localization, whatever -- operates at whatever pace the code gets delivered.
Never in my entire life have I been in the situation where the engineering manager said, "well folks, localization is backed up so we've got no more code we need to write. Go home and check in next week to see if we have any work?"
The only exception I can think of might be videogames where the bottleneck is the art and then maybe the testing loop. But gaming isn't representative of software development generally at all.
A fully curated backlog with complete specifications that is kept up to date with current changes in the product/industry? I've never had the privilege of working in an environment like that.
Your "coding team" there isn't actually coding most of the time. Sitting down to type isn't the bottleneck, but the work that needs to happen so you can sit down and type what needs to be typed.
I find it is either coding or design but yeah not sure where the perspective of the GP come from, that has not been my experience. I have actually vented with other devs about too many brainstorming meetings, ideas of what to do we are never short on. Maybe where I agree slightly is the devil is in the maintenance, ai can maybe? help with that but i think you will quickly reach a saturation point where you have more than you can manage.
I had a period of time at my last job where the product org was so dysfunctional engineers did in fact run out of work.
Initially I didn’t mind it because my team focused on technical debt, but it pretty quickly turned sour. Having to scrape up “work” for the team of 6 engineers each morning to appear productive to management was dreadful
This story feels inconsistent. Where did the backlog come from?
The developers would have to help with the requirements and planning all the code changes. That implies a huge amount of non-coding work was done by the developers.
Saying the quiet part out loud. What kind of engineering org outsources this? 80% of engineering is confirming your design works, otherwise it is just LARPing.
My thoughts exactly. Most of my coding is actually writing the tests or coming up with a proper harness to check behaviour of the code. Then of course there's other stuff like operations playbook if you are introducing new infrastructure. I have usually worked in environments where ops, q/a, design, code was the full job. First time I worked with explicit SREs it was a bit weird to give people specific commands to run without an overview of the system.
Every time I hear somebody say a phrase like “art assets” I am humbled, reminded that not all programmers have the same experiences or work in the same environments as I do. I don’t usually think about art assets being a blocking part of the workflow because I work on enterprise information systems.
This is still part of “coding”. It doesn’t make any sense to say you’ve “finished coding” when the program doesn’t actually work as required.
I’ve been aghast to see developers present an unequivocally broken product and try to argue making it not visibly broken is “scope creep”.
I mean, that’s why we argue so much about the best ways to write code: we want to reduce the incidence of bugs and make it easier to correct unexpected errors.
I have seen two sides of these artificial constraints people at their work impose. I am still not sure if these artificial constraints are good or bad.
On one hand, I see these artificial constraints making it hard for individuals of varying skill set (outside of the imposed constraint) to contribute better for a group of people working together. This is when startups say they are scrappier and ‘just do it’ instead of being bogged down by bureaucracy.
On the other hand, having these artificial constraints makes it very easy for hiring, training, communication and alignment, all which are also important in a functioning group.
I work at a place where I interact with customers of various sizes. Sometimes I wonder why larger companies come up with this weird bureaucratic political system of constraints limiting their employees.
Other times, I wonder why some smaller companies let their employees manager a critical system when they seem part expert but not really capable of handling it end to end yet.
It doesn't matter what knowledge based industry it is either, its always people, communication and decision making (or lack of) that makes everything take longer.
Get a committee together to decide multiple products priorities, features, designs and you could be months away from having anything defined enough to code.
Good thing those open source developers learned their craft in isolated rooms, never seeing anyone else’s code.
All of culture and technology builds be accreting on top of previous works. I can’t stand the moral outrage from people who are themselves standing on the shoulders of giants.
You can get pretty far with just K&R and in isolation if you write algorithmic code. Or with just APUE in isolation.
LLMs cannot, they need vast bodies of stolen text to become remotely useful. For all activities, humans need less training material than the laundromats.
Aside from that, there are legal, philosophical and economic arguments that machines are not the same as humans and do not deserve the same rights. 99.99% of the world population outside of SV hype circles would agree with that.
I work in a large enterprise where they are jumping on the product manager bandwagon as well. Personally I don't mind the idea of this role but, similar to the product owner role, it seems to be an invention of consultancies as a way to place high-energy high-billable resources at cash rich companies. So, now we're getting all these "hustlers" being onboarded who eventually don't do much other than parading around and shouting orders at the people doing the actual work.
The way I see it, product management is not a role, is a discipline. There needs to be more partnering in software. E.g. pair a project manager with a tech-lead, together they do product management.
I have worked in large companies with dedicated PM roles and mostly had a pleasant experience. Except a few instances with "real alpha male" energy who wanted me to explain myself. Fortunately this was over Zoom so I explained the problem (I had caused it) and then exited the call. Feature ultimately got delivered, was used and so I was promoted.
These people make me hate working. They don't want to pair with anyone. Understanding work at all is anathema to them. Their brains are too large for such trivial matters.
It’s actually outreach and business development but yeah it’s not coding or product development anymore. Why? because AI makes it easier to make credible sounding stuff, to maintain the appearance of progress, making it harder to tell who’s the real deal. So everyone is drowning in spammish AI. We all see it in recruiting (in all directions), it’s happening too in sales.
On top of this there’s also a confounding factor where it seems we can all do things we couldn’t before. So everyone is trying to reduce their dependencies and increase their offering. Which is driving down opportunities. The world of business is turning into one of those one-sided conferences where everyone is either look for a job, or looking for a sale. No-one is hiring. No-one is buying.
LLMs are trained to write out sequences of words by mapping previous writing. So it’s recycling prior statements. There is no process/tech/innovation to train a system to engage in the world and figure out how things work.
So AI is not yet coming for good writers, performers, journalists, programmers. It’s only lifting up the bottom rungs and giving them the ability to recycle, in the way that all the bad writers, performers, programmers do. That’s why it’s so tiring to consume - it’s the automation of hacks (in the writer, journalist sense).
It also has the side-effect of preventing AI users from improving their skills. At least prolific hacks eventually got good in the past. Instead with vibe coding, your skills atrophy, with prolonged use it turns you back into a hack. So no. Coding is not going to get automated. We’re at the point where a critical mass of people are beginning to see that AI is falling short of the promise.
I'd like AI to be the product management layer of the client/mgmt/engineer sandwich as then it has two sets of humans checking the work that are already used to managing around miscommunication. Letting AI do the JIRA work seems like a perfect fit.
Readit News
"GREAT! That means we can fire the people who do the actual work, and replace them with MBA robots, who neither understand nor care about making a good product"
Pardon my pessimism, but in my whole career, I have never met a PM who actual did the work of driving the product vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling information between management, marketing, design, and engineering. Thinking that hiring more PMs would increase the output in the age of AI is such a childish fantasy.
Its a tragedy as its undervalued - I firmly believe apples products are significantly worse if their engineers led it. Jobs made those products
It’s much less qualified people. Much much less.
As you imply, that role is really more a director role, not a manager role. A manager managers, a director directs, including the vision and product market fit. Most Product Managers I see do not have that authority at all, and at best are constantly having to convince "leadership" like some door-to-door salesman, rather than simply updating leadership in an advise and consent format.
We want PMs to understand the market, the tech, the customer, and the economic value of building a product.
We then ask them to tell us when it will be built, down to the discrete feature and function, be a technical expert for the field and engineering in the product space, ask them to convey the roadmap and timeline to customers and prospects, build reports about everything from utilization to capacity, save deals by changing timelines for “just this one feature”, participate in product marketing, and understand how their product space co-exists in the complex product offerings from a company.
“You are the Chief Product Officer for your product!” is the promise and rallying cry. That’s not an accurate description of what most PMs do and even fewer are capable of doing.
However your experience is not wrong: they're as rare as hens' teeth.
well, in my experience as a developer integration between different systems with different views about how things should work is often the most challenging part of the job, so what you describe sounds like it would be difficult.
I have a couple times, but they didn't have an MBA. Unfortunately though if you have an incompetent C suite or board, it's hard to get anything meaningful done no matter how good the team under them is.
You seem to have a deep misunderstanding of the value PM's provide. What you describe as "just" is a challenging job.
Generally, the vision is set by the founder, and it can be written down in a sentence or two. There's a ton of work trying to translate that vision into something that is coherent across engineers, customers, sales, and marketing.
Also, in product feature teams it is up to the debate whether PMs provide any value, if you put engineers closer to customers. For the PM role to work, they need to convey customer requirements to product requirements. I have never seen a PM do a better job at this in comparison to just sending a TL to a video call with a client.
Deleted Comment
Like I am saying how the current behavior of the app downright needs a big flowchart to explain and I get asked: "Add X, but keep it working for all existing users" when that means the whole freaking flowcharts needs to be redrawn from scratch. When I suggest to remove some things to make things simpler (because the users don't understand it either) I get denied because it would be too much hassle to communicate the changes.
The bottlenecks are almost always elsewhere. Design, quality assurance and debugging, art assets, localizations, hiring, performance management, you name it. And to be fair, AI can streamline some of that.
Literally all the time? Every single month?
I am struggling to understand your perspective. In my existence, the bottleneck is always the coding.
The development team has a backlog that could keep them busy for years. Meanwhile, everyone else -- QA, localization, whatever -- operates at whatever pace the code gets delivered.
Never in my entire life have I been in the situation where the engineering manager said, "well folks, localization is backed up so we've got no more code we need to write. Go home and check in next week to see if we have any work?"
The only exception I can think of might be videogames where the bottleneck is the art and then maybe the testing loop. But gaming isn't representative of software development generally at all.
Initially I didn’t mind it because my team focused on technical debt, but it pretty quickly turned sour. Having to scrape up “work” for the team of 6 engineers each morning to appear productive to management was dreadful
The developers would have to help with the requirements and planning all the code changes. That implies a huge amount of non-coding work was done by the developers.
Deleted Comment
Saying the quiet part out loud. What kind of engineering org outsources this? 80% of engineering is confirming your design works, otherwise it is just LARPing.
This is still part of “coding”. It doesn’t make any sense to say you’ve “finished coding” when the program doesn’t actually work as required.
I’ve been aghast to see developers present an unequivocally broken product and try to argue making it not visibly broken is “scope creep”.
I mean, that’s why we argue so much about the best ways to write code: we want to reduce the incidence of bugs and make it easier to correct unexpected errors.
On one hand, I see these artificial constraints making it hard for individuals of varying skill set (outside of the imposed constraint) to contribute better for a group of people working together. This is when startups say they are scrappier and ‘just do it’ instead of being bogged down by bureaucracy.
On the other hand, having these artificial constraints makes it very easy for hiring, training, communication and alignment, all which are also important in a functioning group.
I work at a place where I interact with customers of various sizes. Sometimes I wonder why larger companies come up with this weird bureaucratic political system of constraints limiting their employees.
Other times, I wonder why some smaller companies let their employees manager a critical system when they seem part expert but not really capable of handling it end to end yet.
Get a committee together to decide multiple products priorities, features, designs and you could be months away from having anything defined enough to code.
"AI has made coding the easy part."
"Things that used to take six engineers three months to build, "my friends and I, we'll just build on a weekend," Ng said.
The man has a complete disdain for the field and for the thousands of open source developers whose code he is using in laundered form.
All of culture and technology builds be accreting on top of previous works. I can’t stand the moral outrage from people who are themselves standing on the shoulders of giants.
LLMs cannot, they need vast bodies of stolen text to become remotely useful. For all activities, humans need less training material than the laundromats.
Aside from that, there are legal, philosophical and economic arguments that machines are not the same as humans and do not deserve the same rights. 99.99% of the world population outside of SV hype circles would agree with that.
The way I see it, product management is not a role, is a discipline. There needs to be more partnering in software. E.g. pair a project manager with a tech-lead, together they do product management.
On top of this there’s also a confounding factor where it seems we can all do things we couldn’t before. So everyone is trying to reduce their dependencies and increase their offering. Which is driving down opportunities. The world of business is turning into one of those one-sided conferences where everyone is either look for a job, or looking for a sale. No-one is hiring. No-one is buying.
So AI is not yet coming for good writers, performers, journalists, programmers. It’s only lifting up the bottom rungs and giving them the ability to recycle, in the way that all the bad writers, performers, programmers do. That’s why it’s so tiring to consume - it’s the automation of hacks (in the writer, journalist sense).
It also has the side-effect of preventing AI users from improving their skills. At least prolific hacks eventually got good in the past. Instead with vibe coding, your skills atrophy, with prolonged use it turns you back into a hack. So no. Coding is not going to get automated. We’re at the point where a critical mass of people are beginning to see that AI is falling short of the promise.