The Age of the Product Manager

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2013/12/marissa_mayer_product_manager_a_new_better_kind_of_ceo.single.html

by sheri • 13 years ago

61 42 13 years ago

slate.com

ajiang2• 13 years ago

The author lost me with his unabashed bias in speaking of other executives:

In the case of someone like Mayer or Steve Jobs—who was accused of many of the same flaws—those strengths and weaknesses make for far better results than the executive alternative, whether it’s a corporate hatchet woman like HP’s Carly Fiorina, an overpaid functionary like Citi’s Vikram Pandit, or an unrepentant economy wrecker like Lehman’s Dick Fuld, not to mention undistinguished wheel tillers like Apple’s John Sculley and his current reincarnation, Tim Cook. Whatever Mayer does with Yahoo, she at least has a fighting chance to revive the company, something that could never have been said of her predecessors.

He could easily make the same point without adding the unnecessary negative adjectives: "Overpaid", "Unrepentant", "Undistinguished". For the record, I think Tim Cook is a very distinguished wheel tiller (if by wheel tiller you mean operationals/supply chain expert) and Vikram Pandit earned $1 in total compensation in 2009-2010, only getting paid starting in 2011 when Citi had already been profitable for a year. Before anyone argues the merits of Tim or Vikram, let me emphasize that my point is not on their merits as CEOs but on the way they were described to make a point for Marissa Mayer.

curiouslurker• 13 years ago

Agree. Some good points in the article but he ends up losing credibility with sweeping statements and a distortion of facts. Tim cooks is a highly capable CEO but just has a different skill set. Peter Drucker said it well, people with great strengths also have great weaknesses. A sure path to mediocrity is to glorify all round generalists. Single purpose tools will win over them any day! (which I believe is the main point the article is trying to make, whether it be PM'ing, operations, people management or even sales!).

Jobs would not have been as succesful in phase 2 of his career without Tim Cook. Cook is an operations expert and a great people manager. He cleaned up Job's messes--being abusive and a royal jerk, taking credit for other people's ideas and being a terrible listener.

And where would jobs be without Woz's technical wizardy?

lhnz• 13 years ago

> A sure path to mediocrity is to glorify all round generalists. Single purpose tools will win over them any day!

Except the days in which they don't.

felipe3• 13 years ago

What is the problem in calling public people for what they really are? Vikram Pandit is overpaid [1], John Sculley was clearly unfit for the position, and although Tim Cook is talented as a supply chain expert, he is not the visionary that Steve Jobs was.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=vikram+pandit+bonuses

jljljl3• 13 years ago

I'm not going to argue about how much Vikram Pandit should be paid, but its worth noting that the 2011 bonus and beyond came after:

1) Pandit was paid a $1 salary for 2009 and 2010 2) Pandit not receiving a bonus for nearly 4 years [1]

It's probably better to look at Pandit's pay across his entire tenure as CEO, vs. objecting to a single lump sum payment.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-12/pandit-compensation...

Also, while Tim Cook is not quite the visionary that Steve Jobs is, Apple's supply chain and ability to exert quality and pricing pressure over suppliers is a huge competitive advantage, and arguably one that keeps their profits so far above other hardware manufacturers.

There are plenty of companies with awesome vision that fail because they can't execute the way Apple can.

enraged_camel2• 13 years ago

>and although Tim Cook is talented as a supply chain expert, he is not the visionary that Steve Jobs was.

There are very few people in the entire world who can be compared to Steve Jobs in this regard. In America, there is only one such person and he is busy running an electric car company and a space rocket company simultaneously.

So yeah, the fact that Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs v2.0 should not be surprising. He was never meant to be. What matters is that he is exceptional in other ways and Apple has benefited from his talents tremendously.

bicknergseng• 13 years ago

I came to say the same thing about Cook. If you look at Jobs, Mayer, etc as "product managers" that focus on creating value vs the others named that slash expenses, you have to recognize Cook's brilliance in creating the world's greatest supply, operations, and logistics machines. It's the offensive line to the iPad and iPhone's star quarterback, and a superior product in it's own right.

That said, maybe Cook's dream of a well oiled machine is more limited than Jobs' vision. Or maybe it needs to be expanded to not just be about Apple.

enraged_camel2• 13 years ago

>and Vikram Pandit earned $1 in total compensation in 2009-2010

I don't disagree with the rest of what you said, but this is bullshit. Most CEOs are compensated via stock options. So the fact that his salary was $1 doesn't mean anything.

ajiang2• 13 years ago

He didn't earn any stock options during the 2009-2010 fiscal years, hence why I said total compensation instead of salary.

omarkatzen2• 13 years ago

Miss. First of all, citing Google as an example in product management is a mistake. Google has, overall, pretty bad product management. Its strength is hard engineering. Being a PM at Google is like having Risk Management at LTCM or Amaranth (hedge funds that blew up) on your resume.

Second, in many tech companies, PMs outrank engineers and the commoditization of tech talent hasn't really gone away. It's just that the titular concept of the "executive" is out of style among the rising generation. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

A good engineer can PM his own work, and doesn't need someone else to tell him what color to paint the bike shed.

Pxtl• 13 years ago

A good engineer can PM his own work, and doesn't need someone else to tell him what color to paint the bike shed.

This highlights exactly how badly she failed at Google. Many Google products are invidiually well-designed. Google makes lots of fantastic things. But the overall product line of Google has always been an incoherent mess, and is only now in the modern era of Plus and Android getting collectively organized.

And since a solid engineer can design a solid product, where does the Product Manager come in? The larger vision. The whole interconnectedness of their entire product line.

And Google sucked at that. Atrociously.

jpwagner• 13 years ago

A good engineer can PM his own work

if you have even a small team of say 5 engineers, it makes no sense for each to be their own PM (5 PM's).

i can't imagine what you think a PM does.

justindz• 13 years ago

I've spent a lot of time in technology product management (PM) and I still frequently encounter "Product Managers" who are doing entirely project management (PMO). And there's business analysts and other technical product management functions that are centered around requirements and specifications rather than market discovery, product fit and strategy, plan for making actual money, etc.

I'm not suggesting that anyone in the thread is conflating PM and PMO in this way, but it's a challenge for the profession and I wouldn't be surprised if given posters perspectives reflect different views on what the PM role is actually supposed to be the expert on. I don't think it's their fault. We use a hyper-generic name that is almost indistinguishable in full and acronym'd form. We also tend to write awful job postings, though that's a rant for another thread.

pinaceae• 13 years ago

i fully agree with your last statement and please spread this mindset far and wide. it really should be engineers making all product designs/decisions. from UI and complex business workflow coverage to all the nice roadmap conversations with customers. and all those devs complaining about "distractions" from their coding? all BS, they like spending 90% of their time fiddling with the above.

makes it easier to compete against you.

mattzito• 13 years ago

A good engineer can PM his own work, and doesn't need someone else to tell him what color to paint the bike shed

A good product manager, having done their job, has provided the good engineer with enough information about goals, features, requirements, user profiles and so on that the good engineer can run with that information and build something kickass. In many cases, the good engineer has enough information that they can make informed decisions about things that were not covered by the PM, such as what color to paint the bike shed.

jjoonathan• 13 years ago

Sure, but the process can become wildly unbalanced. If the engineering is enough of a limiting factor that 90% of the planned ideas never happen and the 10% remainder consists entirely of mission-critical features, then a PM doesn't have much value proposition and it makes sense to combine the engineer and PM roles (supplemented with a culture of "why are you doing that" at standups to prevent tunnel-vision).

The opposite can happen too, of course, when the engineers focus on features that nobody actually wants. I think grandparent's point was that PMs aren't always a good cure for this problem.

bmj• 13 years ago

I'm on the fence about this. I've worked in an organization with product managers for nearly 8 years now. The good product managers know how to drive the product (and understand the market, something engineers may not be interested in) but allow engineers to do their thing. The not-so-good product managers get caught up in small details (like what color to paint the bike shed) and attempt to tell engineers how to implement features.

About 18 months we were acquired by a larger company which had product management in one business unit but not another. We were allowed to keep our PM structure. 18 months later, guess what units have the highest revenue? And guess what unit bled money?

JonFish85• 13 years ago

In my experience, a good PM says "no" to things. I've worked on projects with a weak/ineffectual PM that suffer badly from "feature creep", because the engineers on the team continually moved to make "minor" changes to improve things that ultimately customers didn't want or need. To me, this is where a PM comes in to set the pace and keeps the engineers on track for specific goals.

Granted this is just my experience, and it's from an engineering POV.

RougeFemme2• 13 years ago

And, a good PM also says "no" or "can it wait" or "ok, if you insist, but here's the downside" to folks on the other side of the line - customers, senior management.

codegeek• 13 years ago

"A good engineer can PM his own work..."

Except that PM is about hell of a lot more than PMing the work of an engineer. It is called "Product" management for a reason. Dealing with engineers is just 1 aspect of it.

morganherlocker2• 13 years ago

A good engineer can PM his own work,

A good engineer can do lots of things on their own, many of which are a poor use of their time.

Any engineer working on a sufficiently complex project will spend 100% of their time in meetings without a PM. Even if your average engineer is better at PMing than your average PM (a belief that requires some serious hubris), if the engineer is left with no time for building things then zero work gets done.

omarkatzen2• 13 years ago

Any engineer working on a sufficiently complex project will spend 100% of their time in meetings without a PM.

Well, that's just dysfunctional. If "stakeholders" are that demanding of peoples' time, then they are the problem.

If your culture isn't engineer-driven, you have bigger problems and the number of PMs you have becomes basically irrelevant.

hornbaker• 13 years ago

Second, in many tech companies, PMs outrank engineers

Really? What is one of these companies, for example?

guyzero2• 13 years ago

"A good engineer can PM his own work, and doesn't need someone else to tell him what color to paint the bike shed."

You can supervise a technical team, do performance reviews, code reviews, mentor junior team members AND go out and talk to customers to build use cases and triage feature requests?

Good luck getting any sleep.

snorkel• 13 years ago

Exceptional engineers can PM their own work. For everyone else there's product management.

nradov• 13 years ago

Most tech companies have parallel career tracks for engineers and product managers with equal "ranks" on both tracks. Good engineers can do some PM work. But in vertical markets where the engineers lack personal experience in that field it's unrealistic to expect them to make good decisions about what customers need. For example, good luck finding an engineer who really understands how physicians use EMRs. That's why you have to bring in specialist PMs.

onebaddude• 13 years ago

Marissa Mayer gets more media coverage than any CEO on the planet now that Steve Jobs is gone. I don't understand why.

She's been CEO of Yahoo! for 18 months, and I've been compelled to visit the site exactly zero times in her tenure.

abvdasker• 13 years ago

The Whole Explanation: She's a woman and the CEO of a major website; which isn't to say that she doesn't deserve more attention given the smaller number of female CEOs/women in tech.

dragonwriter• 13 years ago

She's a woman and the CEO of a major website

No, she's the CEO of a significant corporation.

bane• 13 years ago

After google killed off ig, I switched to my.yahoo.com. It's an 85% solution.

klochner• 13 years ago

The successful PMs listed from google are more lead developer than product manager, and they are strong engineers.

The Age of the Product Manager

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