Thread by @onejasonknight

It's common to see people attacking PMs for being ineffective, or tending to micromanagement, or going too far into solution mode. Obviously we don't want to excuse poor behaviour, but we also have to call out that it many companies it feels like PM vs the world 🧵

#prodmgmt

In many companies, product managers are more like project managers, with little to no real control over their product roadmap, buffeted by client / sales demands & not even able to talk to customers

We can talk all day about ineffective leadership & ineffective companies, but let's concentrate on the effects on the PMs. PMs in these companies aren't empowered to actually define the direction of the product and are primarily pushed by management to "optimise engineering"

They're not being judged on outcomes (which are often suboptimal) rather on the amount of features shipped and speed of delivery. They're seen as an internal team, prioritising features they don't believe in and passing exact specs to engineers & exact timings to sales / CS

No actual product manager wants to work like this, but after a few failed attempts to effect change they realise that it'll either be a long slog, or they're on a hiding to nothing. They either stay and "optimise delivery" or they leave and go somewhere else

If they leave they'd better hope they don't end up in the same boat in another company. But they might! And then you start to wonder how many PMs out there have never worked for a "good" product company

For the ones who stay, they're being explicitly pushed to micromanage and over specify, because they're being micromanaged and over specified to. I'm many cases they're literally the messengers

Engineers hate working like this and start blaming the PMs for ever shifting priorities, context-less feature requests and deadline pressure. Sales and CS are blaming the PMs because the features they want are never done on time

The leadership team are blaming the PMs because the product isn't selling like it should, or as good as they think it could be, or the features don't have the impact they thought they would (which was clearly never going to happen). Basically no one's happy with the PM

So next time you, as a non PM, feel like having a massive dig at the PM, realise that this person is probably just as screwed as you, almost certainly desperate to change, and undoubtedly powerless to do so