> You hire everyday great people. Each one needs to be great at something, obsessed by their craft, and driven by quality. You then put them together in a team, without individual responsibilities, ensuring that there’s minimal overlap in areas of greatness.
My current company is full of smart people, and (for a variety of reasons) we don't have product managers. It sucks. What happens is that the things a PM does do not get done. Very few engineers want to maintain relationships with customers, interview users to identify potential features, manage leadership, play politics for resource allocation, and so on. So it doesn't get done. That's what happens there.
At my last company, where I worked for about a year, I had three product managers. Two of them were fired because they were incompetent. One was really, really good (tremendous, in the parlance of this article). Our team still got more done in a year with a fraction of a good PM than my current company has gotten done in over two years without any PMs.
I agree with one thing: there aren't enough good PMs to go around. My belief is the number of people cut out to be a good product manager scales linearly with the size of the population. You need certain personality traits and other qualities that can't be taught. You can mint mediocre PMs in school, but you can't make good ones that way, let alone great ones. The problem we are dealing with is that the software industry did not scale linearly, it exploded exponentially, and it needed 100x the number of people wearing the PM hat than there were actual, bonafide PMs in the world.
My current company is full of smart people, and (for a variety of reasons) we don't have product managers. It sucks. What happens is that the things a PM does do not get done. Very few engineers want to maintain relationships with customers, interview users to identify potential features, manage leadership, play politics for resource allocation, and so on. So it doesn't get done. That's what happens there.
At my last company, where I worked for about a year, I had three product managers. Two of them were fired because they were incompetent. One was really, really good (tremendous, in the parlance of this article). Our team still got more done in a year with a fraction of a good PM than my current company has gotten done in over two years without any PMs.
I agree with one thing: there aren't enough good PMs to go around. My belief is the number of people cut out to be a good product manager scales linearly with the size of the population. You need certain personality traits and other qualities that can't be taught. You can mint mediocre PMs in school, but you can't make good ones that way, let alone great ones. The problem we are dealing with is that the software industry did not scale linearly, it exploded exponentially, and it needed 100x the number of people wearing the PM hat than there were actual, bonafide PMs in the world.