[HN Gopher] Product vs. Engineering ___________________________________________________________________ Product vs. Engineering Author : kiyanwang Score : 141 points Date : 2022-10-17 05:53 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (martinfowler.com) (TXT) w3m dump (martinfowler.com) | javier_e06 wrote: | The Us vs. Them dynamic always fails. The "We are all in this | together" bs also fails because is empty rhetoric. What works is | surround ALL SIDES of the organization with people with superior | soft skills. | [deleted] | fdgsdfogijq wrote: | What I have noticed even in top engineering companies is an | interesting dichotomy. Product determines the "innovation", | engineering determines how to build it. I wonder if thats | because, if you let engineers do both, you end up with a mess and | accomplish nothing. Programming is hard enough, programming | within well defined barriers and goals is much easier. You have a | low risk cycle of design -> code -> test. | | The issue is that often product is not technical enough to bake | in technical possibilities to how they think about innovation. | Not always, but I have seen this happening even on recommendation | and ML marketing systems for some of the large most sophisticated | companies. | SkyPuncher wrote: | In my experience, it's way too easy for engineers to geek out | on the how without addressing the "why". I'm guilty of this | myself, from time to time. | | When product is leading the charge, it often means they've | validated a need from a customer and are ready to address it. | When engineering leads, they're often pushing a capability | without having evaluated it against customer needs. | mkl95 wrote: | > if you let engineers do both, you end up with a mess and | accomplish nothing. | | Hard disagree. When left on their own, a product oriented | engineer delivers value orders of magnitude higher than a | technical product manager. | fdgsdfogijq wrote: | As an engineer I want to agree. But for a large corporation, | I think they prefer the risk averse approach of strict | requirements for engineering. | gopalv wrote: | > I wonder if thats because, if you let engineers do both, you | end up with a mess and accomplish nothing | | No, it is because an Engineer (with technology selection | blinders on) will jump to a What/How before the Why actually | lands in a conversation. | | The why will be recorded as "what the customer wants", we jump | from problem to solution too fast. | | In fact most of the times the product org only provides a | "What" to the engineering team which is where most of the | problems are buried & plays it close to the chest with the | "Why". | | I was an engineer reporting to the CPO in my last job and my | entire job was to diffuse the "Why" down to the engineering | org, so that they felt purposeful about the problems they were | solving & to push back on the What if there's a better solution | possible. But I didn't get to redefine the "Why" part of the | question, even though I really wanted to do it to make more | progress in the directions I was already headed. | | Once you got "what", then you get to "how", "who", "when" and | usually "how much?". | | The message usually bounces off the end of that and goes back, | to the customer who's eventually going to solve the "how much" | problem. | sdevonoes wrote: | You let your engineers diffuse the "Why". | | You let your engineers figure out the "How". | | You let your engineers implement the "What". | | ... at the end you let your engineers figure out everything. | So tiring. | passwordoops wrote: | >is because an Engineer (with technology selection blinders | on) will jump to a What/How before the Why actually lands in | a conversation. | | I'm in marketing/biz dev now at an engineer-led company, and | in a meeting last week a dev team presented a new UI that is | a MASSIVE departure from our current approach. At the end of | the demo, they informed us that a) it's being released in 2 | weeks, b) do you think the clients will like it, and c) can | we charge more for it? | ketzo wrote: | > a) it's being released in 2 weeks b) do you think clients | will like it | | Oh god, that gives me the sweats. Godspeed. | PragmaticPulp wrote: | > What I have noticed even in top engineering companies is an | interesting dichotomy. Product determines the "innovation", | engineering determines how to build it. I wonder if thats | because, if you let engineers do both, you end up with a mess | and accomplish nothing. | | The top companies have product and engineering working closely | together. This allows product people to go deep on optimizing | their product skills and engineers to go deep on optimizing | their development skills, both of which are most effective when | performed in conjunction with each other as part of a strong | team. | | There are great product-minded engineers and great engineering- | minded product managers out there, but it's much easier to find | people who are simply good at their domain and know how to work | closely with people in other domains to get things done. | | Some companies try to cargo-cult this by drawing a dividing | line: Product defines the "what" and engineers define the | "how". Product works in isolation, hands things off to | engineers, then engineers churn through tickets in isolation. | This is not good at all. | zingar wrote: | The elephant in the room for me is that it's only the existence | of "product organizations" that create the problems described | here. Product skills are a vital PART of a multi disciplinary | team, but should not be separate or - heaven forbid but just the | unfortunate reality - consider themselves in management over or | otherwise in charge of any other part of the team. You want to | make software? Fine, come be part of the team with me. We'll work | together and make great things happen. Don't fool yourself that | things will be better if you just tell me what to do. | bjornsing wrote: | I'm not too fond of the "separate Product and Engineering | organizations" model... The whole idea of having one branch of | the org chart telling another what to do is kind of flawed. I | think it's often better to divide up the product over many | separate small teams, each with a product focused "mini CEO" and | a tech focused "mini CTO". | lifeisstillgood wrote: | Yes. | | Take a rough guide to military planning and you see "strategy, | Operations and Tactics" not "business vs tech". | | And the prevailing direction is towards "mission command" - | where each level provides the resources down to the next but | it's not "directing" as opposed to "hand off" | P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: | 100% this, what ends up happening is product wedges themselves | between business and technical so they wield the power due to | having business' ear, and any attempt by technical to | communicate directly with business is met with severe | reactions. | | The thing to understand is that very likely your technical | people are smarter than your product people. In addition, part | of software development is being able to identify what needs to | be solved. Any developer with a modicum of experience knows how | to do this. | | Just as you have a technical leader on the team, you need a | technical architect on the team. That person can interface with | the business or the business analyst (or both) as needed. | | separate teams is a degenerate case for strong software | development. | | I once literally had a business person ask "who should be | involved in this conversation" and my response was "product and | technical so we can advise". Product responded after me with | "Product" and the lack of technical there was deafening. | | It becomes a power play, the theory of the different | departments works out about as well as putting a racist and a | black man in a room to collaborate on race relations. | taude wrote: | theres a lot of orgs where product people will be onshore and | the technies offshore, so the model and barrier kind of makes | sense (for this operating model), and typically the Product | people will be the more expensive/smarter/critical resource | in this case. | kenhwang wrote: | In my personal experience, that model has rarely led to a | good product, good technical implementation, or even good | development velocity. | P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: | In this setup you need onshore to manage that offshore team | or you're just asking for pain. | esotericimpl wrote: | The key to this is to only hire "product" people who grew out | of either Design or Engineering, Anyone who started as | "product" is a wanna be general who provides minimal value. | | My usual first question to any product candidate is do you | find yourself coming from a Design, UX, or Engineering | background? | lliamander wrote: | People with _relevant_ industry experience, even if non- | technical, are also good candidates for product roles. | cj wrote: | I've had luck hiring people with "dev bootcamp" level | experience who didn't excel as an engineer post-bootcamp, | but know enough technical jargon to communicate, | collaborate, and understand engineers. | | Often these are people who became bored with day to day | coding having more interest in the business side of the | company | [deleted] | robocat wrote: | > putting a racist and a black man in a room | | Suggestion: Avoid prickly metaphors. Especially ones that | imply reader is situated in a particular country? | | Reason: Everyone can be racist. In a place with only black | men, is nobody a racist? | | Disclaimer: White guy on an Island. Sorry for off-topic | content, I try not to make it a habit. I am generally against | PC bullshit. | noobker wrote: | >very likely your technical people are smarter than your | product people | | Intelligence is multifaceted. That business listens to | product and not to engineers could be seen as a type of | social intelligence of which engineers are notoriously | unskilled. | | Regardless, framing any portion of your organization as | "smarter than" (implicitly "better than") isn't going to help | in terms of fostering collaboration. | wittycardio wrote: | Yes it is multi faceted. But in this industry one of those | facets is worth more. | Nemi wrote: | I am an engineer by trade, but I would argue product is | more important than engineering. WHAT you work on is | ultimately more important than HOW it is achieved from my | experience. Yes, bad engineering will ruin a product, but | it is all moot if you are not working on the right thing. | So many companies I have worked with are working on the | wrong thing. Another way to put it is, a company with a | great product that has bad engineering will outperform a | company that has great engineering but a bad product. | Product/market fit rules all. Once I understood this I | was able to work with the product team better. | lliamander wrote: | > Intelligence is multifaceted. That business listens to | product and not to engineers could be seen as a type of | social intelligence of which engineers are notoriously | unskilled. | | To some extent that's true. I'm sure that product folks | tend to have higher verbal intelligence (on average). But | all forms of intelligence are highly correlated with each | other, and engineers are likely higher overall. Many | (though not all) of the engineers I know are quite | articulate, even when English isn't their first language. | | Much of the difference in "social intelligence" might just | come down to being more outgoing and assertive, rather than | an actual difference in ability. | | > Regardless, framing any portion of your organization as | "smarter than" (implicitly "better than") isn't going to | help in terms of fostering collaboration. | | I agree that the other poster's framing was hostile, but I | am sympathetic to their frustration. I think it is helpful | to remind product and business leaders that your engineers | can be great allies in solving hard business problems. | MajimasEyepatch wrote: | Also a lot of PMs are former engineers. One could argue a | person capable of doing both at a high level is "smarter" | than a person who cannot. Certainly they would have a | unique perspective compared to people who have only been on | one side or the other. | | But like you said, intelligence is multifaceted, and | comparing people's intelligence is pointless and divisive. | rektomatic wrote: | >very likely your technical people are smarter than your | product people | | I'm guessing you work in the technical side of things? | [deleted] | P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: | should I guess you're not and that your sole reason for | responding is defensiveness in wanting to believe you're | smarter than software developers? | | Or maybe we can try again? | ButterBiscuits wrote: | > should I guess you're not and that your sole reason for | responding is defensiveness in wanting to believe you're | smarter than software developers? | | You can guess that, and honestly it's not even a terrible | guess. But it makes you a hypocrite. If you're offended | by someone making this kind of assumption about you, | reciprocating it isn't going to bring down barriers to | communication. | | > Or maybe we can try again? | | You deflected entirely from the comment, which is fine. | But then why reply at all? It sounds like you just want | to be defensive. | bkuehl wrote: | Our company did a restructuring a couple years ago where the | web/user-facing part of the dev team was moved under the same | branch with Product. At first I was skeptical, but it has | worked out very well. Product Managers and the developers feel | like they are on the same "team" working toward a better | product. There's a lot more collaboration with PMs trying to | get developer input/insight, etc. Things used to be a lot more | siloed, and I think it really hurt innovation. | drewbeck wrote: | This is a really intriguing approach! I can see why it works. | crazygringo wrote: | What you're describing is how it's already usually done, from | what I've seen. | | But the PM still reports to a director of product, and the TL | still reports to director of engineering. | | And when the director of product and director of engineering | have different visions and priorities and criteria for | promoting, that's the problem described in the article. | | And you certainly can't have engineering report to product or | vice-versa... I've seen both before and it's utter disaster. | makestuff wrote: | yeah i was at a startup that had SVP of product and SVP of | engineering. For the entire year I was there 60% of the time | was spent in meetings where they just blamed each other. | Engineering would say product didn't tell us what to build so | we just built what we thought they wanted and product would say | they told engineering what to build but they did it | incorrectly. | | The company I am at now has a leader who has product and | engineering reporting to them for their charter basically | following the mini-ceo/cto you described. It has its issues but | works much better than the alternative. | zingar wrote: | The leader who has product and engineering reporting to them | is a CTO. Someone who only does one of those things is not a | CTO and shouldn't have C-level decision making power. | ipaddr wrote: | You needed a project manager SVP reporting to cio to make | that work with a department for requirements | chrisabrams wrote: | Thank you for this it was much appreciated humor during my | lunch break! | CSMastermind wrote: | I disagree but the thing I'd disagree most about is calling | your product managers a "mini CEO". That exact mistake as led | to some of the worst product outcomes I've witnessed. | wobbly_bush wrote: | Curious, what about that title caused bad outcomes? | CSMastermind wrote: | I think it sets the wrong expectations for those product | managers but in terms of their duties and in terms of | collaboration with their team members. | | I've seen product managers who thought they were _managers_ | actually in charge of the people on the team and this led | to frustration. OR they thought they were decisions makers | who had some measure of authority instead of just another | member of a team with a specific role. In general | collaboration with | | And when I think about the product managers, I've worked | with who described themselves as "mini-CEOs" they lacked | basic product management skills. For example: focusing on | the what over the why, being overly process driven, and | lacking a cohesive vision for what the product will be long | term. | | I can't tell you correlation-causation here. Whether the | description of "mini-CEOs" attracts people who are bad at | product management or whether telling someone their job is | to be a "mini-CEO" causes them to behave poorly. | hipppocamp wrote: | > I think it's often better to divide up the product over many | separate small teams, each with a product focused "mini CEO" | and a tech focused "mini CTO". | | This only gets you so far. It tends to optimize for speed of | teams but at the detriment of the overall product. | | Eventually you end up with splintering of ideas, terminology, | duplicate functionality and features that almost work the same | way. You see it across all big companies and products. AWS is a | great example of the mess they've made between services and how | they don't always play well together and you end up with teams | actually competing as they assert that their product should own | something that's others shouldn't. I wouldn't be surprised if | Google is in the same mess (Drive is a fucking cluster of a | mess and it's basically impossible to use for anything | productivity related - and don't get me started on how Google | Classroom works within that ecosystem that's a double yikes). | Same goes for Atlassian. What's the saying? Don't ship your org | chart? | AndreasHae wrote: | Can you think of any FAANG scale orgs that haven't run into | having a fragmented product landscape? Maybe there's just a | hard limit of how much complexity one business unit can | handle before it stops being able to scale up. With that in | mind, decentralized teams with tight product+tech | collaboration seem to be a successful model. Otherwise we | would probably already have seen an example of a successful | tech company with centralized product/tech departments. | Jare wrote: | The fragmentation issues doesn't need FAANG scale, and is | already a possibility for any org that scales past 50 | people or so. If a team has the potential to interfere with | another, or the need to depend on another, you already have | the primordial soup for conflict and widening cracks. | kcexn wrote: | Isn't Apple very successful with centralised product/tech | departments? | [deleted] | vsareto wrote: | That's usually what happens: assigned product people to | engineering teams who focus on what the engineering team works | on, then they report one level higher. | | You shouldn't be seeing a new decision-making Product person | every month or so - that's bad news bears. | | It gets to this state naturally if your product is fairly large | and has loose/well-defined modules that are distinct from one- | another. | PragmaticPulp wrote: | Fortunately, this article isn't either. The second half of the | article is about breaking down that wall (From the article): | | > Eliminating the wall between Product and Engineering is | essential to establishing high performing product teams. | | (Quoting parent post): | | > The whole idea of having one branch of the org chart telling | another what to do is kind of flawed. | | Completely agree, and all of these approaches are destined to | fail if it turns into different branches of the org chart | fighting with each other. | | Most of my issues with separate product orgs have come from | product executives who feel the product/engineering | relationship needs to be more of a handoff or prescriptive | relationship. It's not. | | > I think it's often better to divide up the product over many | separate small teams, each with a product focused "mini CEO" | and a tech focused "mini CTO". | | Whatever you do, don't call them "mini CEO" and "mini CTO". | This generally implies that the CEO is at the top, which breaks | the whole collaborative team idea that we're going for in the | first place. | spacemadness wrote: | I'm dealing with this right now and it feels like we're at | constant war instead of collaborating. | hackitup7 wrote: | Early in my tenure running a Product team I decided that one of | my goals would be for PM/Design and Engineering to be as close as | possible. I would literally say that I wanted them to view one | another as brothers/sisters, and tried to set the example that we | would go to bat for engineering (and expect the same) in almost | all cases. I think it was probably one of the best organizational | decisions I ever made. | mrcwinn wrote: | I'm a Chief Product Officer at the moment with both experience | around product design, UX/UXR, product management -- but also a | very deep software engineering background. | | I certainly have some blind spots, but it's a real advantage to | be able to communicate a cohesive narrative and build "one" | team (with lots of fantastic disciplines and even, at times, | some intentional silo'ing). I can describe the why behind our | prioritization, but also keep in view the strategic engineering | investments we'll make to support our product vision over the | long-term. Will it scale forever? Who knows. | | But I absolutely believe in fully-integrated product teams. You | can really ship some amazing work when you get it right. | ipaddr wrote: | I have seen cases where pm is close to developers or close to | the business leaders. Sometimes too close to either group | excludes the other. A balanced pm is preferred. | uptownfunk wrote: | Hard to get right, becomes a mess if you don't. The toxic us vs | them attitude can quickly take over and jam up any hope of | progress. Having them on one team is helpful. Also having a | healthy org culture of no blame games, mistakes are not ideal but | they happen, and focus on spreading happiness to your customers | in a sustainable way for everyone also plays a role. | no_wizard wrote: | This is part of a whole series[0] that I am reading and finding | quite insightful. | | I think the "pull quote" for me, was this, from the immediate | article: | | _Establish team working agreements at all levels. Ensure every | team member knows what role they're playing_ | | I think this is a real problem not just in scale ups, but in a | lot of engineering organizations. There's no working agreements | on what roles that each part of the company plays and expects | others to play, its often weighted against some preference of | higher up management (often VP / executive / director depending | on the size of the org and influence each layer has) that creates | these silos and break downs. | | I think its uncommon to think of start up environments like this, | but it is entirely true, once you get past a certain number of | employees and start having more delegation layers (directors / | VPs) you start to run into these silo problems quickly if you | aren't aware of them or don't actively do something about | preventing them. | | Whole thing is worth reading though, very insightful to me at | least! | | [0]: https://martinfowler.com/articles/bottlenecks-of-scaleups/ | righttoolforjob wrote: | Bad (and common) engineering managers avoid agreements on | purpose to: | | 1) cover their asses | | 2) change anything at will | | If you never agreed to anything, then you can keep demanding | whatever, and blame whoever as well. It's a really shitty | management style. I left such an organisation not too long ago | where I would say that the engineering department survived not | because of, but rather despite of the head of that department. | First few years nobody had a clue what he was doing most of the | days and when he decided to get actively involved it was | obvious he had no clue about anything. He still has no clue but | he's made sure to surround himself with incompetent yes-sayers | to cement his position. | | A real political genius. | PragmaticPulp wrote: | > Leaders should set a principle and expectation of a blameless | culture. When something goes wrong, it's a wonderful learning | opportunity, to be studied and used to continuously improve. An | example of this is the concept of a blameless post-mortem. | | I understand this idea. I've read several books on the subject | and worked to integrate it into several teams now. I think it's | an admirable goal. | | But the blameless culture idea becomes counterproductive when | taken to extremes. I've been in a couple "blameless cultures" | where a small number of people were _clearly_ to blame for every | project falling behind, but every retrospective was about how we | could have organized our work better, or planned better, or been | more clear about the expectations. No, at some point, the only | way we 're going to ship better is to shine some light directly | at the one poor performer on the team that everyone _knows_ is to | blame. That doesn 't mean being mean or rude or calling them out | in public, but something must be done. | [deleted] | __turbobrew__ wrote: | Yea there is a balance between giving engineers power to | effectively do their jobs and limiting the amount of damage | they can do. You can put up more guard rails for engineers, but | it will most likely make it harder to do their job or deal with | production emergencies. What is also tough is if you have a | group of highly privileged engineers who can manage not having | guard rails except for a few cowboys who cause problems. You | can limit the capabilities of the entire group to deal with the | cowboys, but then you are making all of the responsible | engineers less effective. | | One solution is to move the cowboys to a position where they | can do less damage, another is to make the cowboys responsible | for their repeat offences, or you can just go full up blameless | and have to deal with outages caused by repeat offenders. | | I have seen this in action at my org -- we basically have a | chaos monkey who is a person. They cause an outage and not even | a week later they are doing dumb/overly risky actions again. | prsimp wrote: | In my experience, there is a thin line between "blameless" | cultures and "responsibility-less" cultures. Blameless cultures | accept that we are all human, make mistakes, have off periods, | etc. "Responsibility-less" cultures are as you describe -- they | eschew honest conversations about the actual forces that affect | projects. Instead they tend to repeat the same process | discussions ad nauseum, typically discussing symptoms rather | than the actual causes. | | Since we as humans often prefer to avoid conflict (sometimes at | all costs), it's not uncommon to see companies tilt towards the | latter. This is exacerbated in "scale up" environments when | rapid personnel changes make it difficult to build the kind of | trust necessary for direct, honest communication. | sophrocyne wrote: | Create a culture where making mistakes is ok, but failing to | learn from those mistakes is unacceptable. | | Not mine - That's a Dalio principle. But one that is very | sorely needed in many work environments. | SkyPuncher wrote: | Yea, that's a culture that lacks any sort of accountability. | | When patterns continue to repeat, one of two things needs to | happen: | | * Management recognizes this is a culture/process issue which | many people are affected by. Management must fix it. | | * An individual continues to repeat the same type of error, | despite having had the opportunity to identify, learn, and | address it. | fleddr wrote: | Too much fluff. Keep it simple. | | A good PM can clearly articulate what is to be build and why. In | my experience, the why is often completely lacking. Zero | research. Shady A/B tests with unclear conclusions. Pretty much | the "why" is often somebody deep down in the business emailing a | random idea. And it seemed cool and people want to please people | rather than dismiss them. | | With a clear and simple goal and why, if you have half-decent | engaged engineers, they can now _think along_ on how to best | achieve the goal. This could refine the feature itself, its | visual design, anything. The idea that product people have | monopoly knowledge on product is ridiculous. | | So with a clear and hardened idea you build it. Then we come to | the other part that PMs never seem to engage in: feedback. | | Did it work? Did anybody use the feature at all? Was the goal | met? Did we get user feedback? Often lacking as engineers are to | focus on the new sprint. | | Engineers can't grow or feel product ownership if they're so far | removed from its real world impact. | | And as for my second trigger: don't "negotiate" technical debt. | The idea that it's negotiable is why it won't get done, so make a | stand and remove room for negotiation. It very much is in your | power to do so. | eftychis wrote: | I think this runs back on "Innovator's Dilemma"[1] and "... they | didn't think if they should build it." | | I say it is also a failure of scaling and power struggle. Because | you have to have a VP for engineering and a VP of product to show | to your customers and to your employees right? | | As the article does well to point out that backfires in so many | ways: "engineers get stuck due to lack of context." Imagine the | market needing a bridge and internally to be playing pantomime on | "we need a beam I think of x weight..." Try to build a plane that | way I dare you. Software is fine as you can just convince the | customer to buy extra hardware. | | That sucks of course if you expect to consider your employees as | resources in a factory chain because of course those models apply | cleanly to engineering work... (That last sentence was | sarcastic.) Companies do it because it is cheaper to have people | multi task in the short term and ticks boxes. That's what kills | companies so I am fine with that I guess. More companies will | sprung that will be better hopefully. | | 1. | https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2615.The_Innovator_s_Dil... | hinkley wrote: | > Try to build a plane that way I dare you. | | This may be why modern Boeing is so fucked. | | source: worked on the 787 program, the hardware for our team | was selected before there was a team. Our part was only | successful and on time in large part because I'm a stubborn | asshole. | eftychis wrote: | Thanks for the input! I have only second and third hand input | from the 787 program so didn't want to imply anything there. | I hope Boeing fixes that managerial issues leading to what | you describe as I am a fan of its historical product in | general. (If I am reading your comments right and I am not | blinded by my pre-conceptions.) | hinkley wrote: | Boeing isn't Boeing anymore, it's McDonnell Douglas wearing | a Boeing skin suit. | | I think that example is slightly tangential to your thrust, | but sort of illustrates the bigger problem that when a | project is operating anywhere near the boundaries of | logistical possibility, it becomes very hard to incorporate | perspective from the people with boots on the ground, who | know ten ways to get something done and that your | suggestion isn't one of them. | | It's the same problem General Contractors have with trying | to herd architects who try to design at the limits of | materials science and don't understand that there's a large | gap between physics and execution, where building codes, | manufacturing defects, and the ravages of time all live. | Not to mention costs (exotic materials often require exotic | labor). | BerislavLopac wrote: | Stubborn Assholes is the name of my new post-punk trash-metal | crossover band. | hinkley wrote: | The very first figure in this article illustrates one of my pet | peeves: We see a classic S curve productivity chart and then we | immediately attribute it to some sort of management failure | instead of pure unadulterated reality. | | As it turns out, the S curve is a plot of the area under a bell | curve; at the beginning of the project it's hard to get traction. | At the end it's hard to cross all the T's and dot the i's. Most | of your velocity comes in the middle, which is why it's so hard | to plot an intercept. | | We usually make the fiction of the intercept into reality by | accumulating tech debt more quickly. If you're very lucky with | your engineering culture, you are maintaining the slope of the | line at the end because you built a culture of competence along | the way and you are now capable of completing more tasks per unit | of time than you were at the midpoint, often by sacrificing | throughput before the midpoint. | williamcotton wrote: | The role of "Product Engineer" is a deeper solution to this issue | that I find appealing. | | But let's do away with the term "engineer" almost completely, | because what the average web application developer is doing is | hardly engineering. The tools are at the point where most of the | computer engineering has been abstracted away to the point where | developers can primarily focus on business logic. Most | experienced web application developers that I know have already | been doing product work in their day-to-day routines. People who | actually write code in direct contact with customers and their | needs is highly efficient. | | Our industry needs an order of magnitude less people who do not | write code. In my view everyone should be a programmer of some | sort. Our management tools are programmable yet management will | not lower themselves to the ranks of the manual laborer and | instead will choose to hire someone to program their management | tools for them. This is highly inefficient. I'm sure we would see | less meetings if management actually had something worthwhile to | do with their time. | | I do see a need for computer engineers in that they should write | the tools that the other programmers use for these kind of | domain-specific purposes. | williamcotton wrote: | This should in turn reduce not only the layers of management | but the need for managers to make up for the inefficiencies | between "person dictating idea" and "person implementing idea". | | It's also a sign to me that our tools for product development | are too general purpose and we would benefit from less capable | and easier to learn and use DSLs. Those DSLs should at least be | extendable from in-house computer engineers who do in fact | worry about things like data storage, CPUs, and memory | management. | agomez314 wrote: | Great insight. Like Hal Abelson said, nowadays it's more of a | matter of how "you use various kinds of programming styles and | techniques like combinators to glue things together." This | lowers the bar to programming to more people, making the excuse | "i'm not technical" less and less relevant. | metaquestxyz wrote: | BerislavLopac wrote: | My experience in this area boils down to this: | | First of all, I think that the title "product manager" is not a | very good one, and is actively harmful. While it is technically | correct, the word "manager" in most people evokes the idea of | managing people, and there is a very short step from there to | seeing PMs as ones who "manage" everyone involved with the | product development. "Product owner" is not much better either. | | But we don't have a much better term, so PMs it is. | | For all practical purposes, the amount of features a software | product can have implemented is virtually unlimited. In reality, | features can only be added over time, and the role of product | managers is to guide the prioritization by making product | decisions. Long time ago, in a talk at a startup event, I | compared PMs with the people being quartered in medieval times | [0]: the product development process is pulled in different | directions by various "horses" - groups more or less directly | involved in the development and use of that product, and the PM's | role is to balance those horses and prevent any one of them of | dragging the whole thing in its direction. (I have identified | those horses as, respectively: sales, marketing, end users and | engineering. This is a common arrangement, but others are | possible in some environments.) | | Ultimately, the PM should have enough understanding of particular | interests of each of those groups to be able to make informed | decisions. Sometimes, the priority will be to make the product | easier to sell (e.g. add this feature this potential customer is | asking for); at other times, the priority will be to resolve some | technical debt to make deployment faster; and so on. Obviously, | that understanding does not come from vacuum; it requires talking | to the representatives of the all of the "horses" and gathering | all the necessary information. | | In practice, it is common - as some other comments have mentioned | - for the PMs to succumb to the pressure of the "business" side | of the equation (sales and marketing). As a technical lead, I | have always made a point of working together with the PMs and | help them keep that balance. | | [0] | https://media.hswstatic.com/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJjb250ZW50Lmhzd3N0... | tikhonj wrote: | In my ideal world the role would be called something like | "product developer" with the responsibility to develop and | articulate a clear vision for the product (with a holistic | understanding of "product"). | dsmmcken wrote: | "Product Designer" is becoming a more common role at big | companies these days, and tends to have a similar role to a | traditional PMs. Usually from a designer background. | Jenk wrote: | Does "Product Lead" evoke similar (negative) thoughts for you? | I find that title (and anything "... Lead") carries the least | connotation. | | And IME, in an org that has PLs, PM becomes "one who manages | PLs" - otherwise, if there are PMs but no PLs, I get the | impression they are mostly Project Managers, rebranded to | Product Managers, but without any of the Product responsibility | or thought. | BerislavLopac wrote: | Yes, "Product Lead" does feel much better. +1 | [deleted] | wobbly_bush wrote: | > at other times, the priority will be to resolve some | technical debt to make deployment faster; and so on | | It's interesting you mention this. In my experience, PMs have | only owned end-user experience, they come up with end-user | project prioritization. The consolidation of asks from various | departments was instead done by dev managers/directors/VPs. So | for example, a dev manager decides between a customer-facing | feature and some tech debt to make deployments faster - | contrasting short term deliverables with long term velocity of | the team. | BerislavLopac wrote: | > they come up with end-user project prioritization | | Then they have failed from the beginning. Technically, | _everything_ you do affects end-users - including faster | deployments - although in some cases that effect is more | obvious than in others. | | In a perfect world, each product (or, in a complex system, a | well defined subset of features within a product) should have | a dedicated representative of each of the "horses", who | should agree on the priorities - with the product lead (thank | you @Jenk!) guiding the process and helping resolve the | conflicts. | wobbly_bush wrote: | > Technically, everything you do affects end-users - | including faster deployments - although in some cases that | effect is more obvious than in others. | | I agree with this. This is why the dev | managers/directors/VPs own the _delivery_ of the business | goals for the year. They balance the customer-facing | improvements with internal improvements which affect | development velocity (deployments, ops, how easy is it for | new employees to onboard onto a code base, how easy is it | for someone with <2 years experience on a codebase to ship | a feature, etc.). | | So PMs in collaboration with dev managers own _what_ | customer-facing improvements to deliver, and the | responsibility of _how_ to deliver and the actual delivery | falls on the dev managers. | | I'm not proposing this as a new model, I'm saying this is | what I've seen been followed in some companies. | sdevonoes wrote: | Product developer (or Product Engineer since we use the word | engineer everywhere). Compare team A = {software engineer, | product engineer, design engineer, qa engineer}, and team B = { | software engineer, product manager, design engineer, qa | engineer }. Team A screams "all team members collaborate the | same way when it comes to build a product". Team B screams | "there is 1 manager, and the rest are not" | iancmceachern wrote: | I've seen it work, and I've seen it not work a lot. | | The key to getting it to work is to build an environment, a | culture, where the product testing and feedback is baked into the | process and communicated directly to the engineers and designers | doing the work. | | It looks a lot like a race team building and operationalizing a | new racing platform. The movie ford vs Ferrari captures it well. | Pragmatically in what I do (design medical devices and robotics) | it looks like regular "labs" where you test your prototype | product in real world conditions, gather feedback, and iterate | the design based on that feedback. It doesn't work when those | functions are siloed. I.E. The lab people run the lab in a | vacuum, write up theor findings, send them up through their | management then back down through engineering management then to | the individual designers. This doesn't work, it's like the game | of telephone, the end is never what was initially communicated. | | What works is to entrench those two together. The designers doing | the work attend and are part of the labs. They know first hand | what to do and why. It cuts out the miscommunication and also | cuts out 50% of the needless work and meetings. | ng12 wrote: | I've become pretty skeptical about "Product Management" as a | function. I feel like it's one of those ideas that's cargo-culted | from Google without anywhere near the same rigor. | | A good product person is worth their weight in gold but holy hell | there are a lot of charlatans out there. These days I prefer to | work at companies without PMs, as an engineer the odds simply | don't work in your favor. | zingar wrote: | So much snake oil. So many people have "shifted from product | owner to product management", but I've yet to meet anyone who | can tell me the difference. | VinLucero wrote: | Fair discourse: I have worked at Google, Credit Karma and now | Sivo (YC W21) as a (technical) program and product manager. | | I know for a fact that Google doesn't actually have "Product | Owner" as a role in their org chart. | | At Google, the separation is: | | Product Manager (Vision), which is focused on gathering | business needs and driving the Feature Roadmap. | | Program Manager (Execution), which focuses on finding ways to | unblock delivery of the vision with cross-functional teams, | such as getting designs, legal approvals, etc. | | I recently experienced a Product Owner for the first time | when hiring one at Sivo (YC W21). | | It seems like Product Owners exist to accelerate the Roadmap | vision into Epics and Stories in solutions like JIRA so | product visions are more actionable by engineering. | | Similarly, while not a role at Google, I have heard that some | MegaCorps will have "project managers" that often report up | into Program Managers. This is similar to the product owner | and product manager relationship. | | Hope that helps! | ketzo wrote: | How do Engineering Managers work alongside those two roles? | singron wrote: | This is how you end up with 8 bosses like in office | space. EM, TL, ATL, PM, PgM are all telling you what to | do and asking for status updates. I wish there was | someone to liase and multiplex all that, but I think they | all think that's what their job is. | cbsmith wrote: | Product Management certainly predates Google by at least a | generation. Indeed, Google is notoriously skeptical on the | product management role and requires their product managers to | have a technical background to at least some degree. | extantproject wrote: | https://archive.ph/tAAhH ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-10-18 23:00 UTC)