Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?

In a recession, where companies give up on the efficacy of their marketing and sales operations, a lot of those positions get cut. When a company merges or gets acquired (often, to improve financial metrics), that enables the company to cut a lot of marketing and sales positions.

Product is seen as a position that is seen as a bit more stable. The company still sells the product, current and potential users can still be interviewed, feature work still needs to be prioritized for developers, and various executives are loath to take over a position whose workload often feels like a lot of drudgery. So PMs are less likely to get laid off.

With that said, good PMs are worth their weight in gold, and most others are an anchor. When lots of people take some courses and switch to PM positions, well, Product suffers. Smart executives understand this and resist it. Unfortunately, most executives are not so smart... do the math.

I heard a statement before a lot of the big tech layoffs were in full swing: "There were a lot of low-interest rate product managers in tech over the past couple years."

Don't get me wrong, I think product management is actually the hardest job in tech because it can straddle so many different areas: design, marketing, data analysis, customer relationships, project management, etc. etc. I still think great project managers are worth their weight in gold.

That said, I think great product managers are extremely rare, and many (most?) product managers are neutral or negative value adds. Reasons being:

1. Product managers need to be incredibly detail oriented. They should know every in-and-out, every edge condition of their product. I've found this level of detail-oriented-ness to be very rare. It can be one of the biggest causes of friction between engineering and product.

2. The best product managers have a good, basically innate sense of products and features that will work for users. This skill is incredibly rare.

3. I think most importantly, many product managers see themselves more as project managers: keep Jira boards up to date, coordinate with stakeholders, schedule meetings, etc. These types of product managers can do lots of work to look busy, but I'm usually like "yeah, I can schedule my own meetings."

So my point is I'm extremely skeptical of people that can do a 1-3 month boot camp and be good product managers (though, that said, I think the same thing of code bootcamps). I do think there are some "pipelines" to becoming product managers that should be strengthened, as I've seen some very good product managers come from being very detail-oriented and motivated QA or customer service folks.

But in general, I think the time of hoards of useless product managers is coming to an end.

The Big Con[0] book touches on this subject.

Essentially, non technical people who want to insert themselves into technical projects account for many of the new PMs we see, at least in consulting, nowadays.

[0] https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-big-con

Product owner/manager often works out fine as an informal position, where certain people in leadership roles are making decisions because they have an excellent aptitude for doing such; they especially have the ability to understand and empathize with their user base.

That works fine until it stops working, and then it works horribly, because engineers have asserted themselves as antagonistic product owners: I know what customers want! And they just plain don't. Things can go completely insane. It boggles my mind how badly some otherwise competent folks can botch this.

I didn't even realize how important this role was until I was working with people who clearly had no business asserting themselves into it, and I'd rather have someone less technical doing it than an engineer who is awful at it.

People like to point to shining examples of Product Managers adding huge amounts of value. They are like Unicorns, and you will probably never encounter one in your career. Moreover, many companies are unable to setup a hiring pipeline that can reliably detect such individuals. So hiring for the role Product Manager is a net negative for most companies, because their odds of hiring a good one are basically 0.

The result is that Product Manager is mostly an imposter role. It's created by charismatic "business" people to insert themselves into an area of value creation. They are attracted to the light and heat that tech has been giving off. Once they are in, they promulgate the idea that the role is absolutely necessary for success and create more demand for hiring similar imposter roles. The necessity of these roles is now part of the conventional wisdom.

As an imposter role, anyone well liked, with enough confidence can pivot into it. Areas with clear metrics for success like demand generation have seen cuts. But the success of a product manager is more difficult to quantify, and so it's a good place to jump to.

We really struggle to find good PMs. I've noticed a proliferation of low quality PMs (they don't really understand the product; they just act ask a secretary for technical leads and/or users). In particular, I wish we had more opinionated, less passive PMs.

Not something I've noticed, and honestly even if it is the case, there's a limit to the number of PMs out there just given that there's a practical minimum ratio of PMs to engineers.

With tech seeing layoffs and a drive for efficiency, right now we're definitely seeing the number of PM spots decrease. Also, in times of cost cutting, you can drive the ratio of engineers to PMs up - I just listened to Zuckerberg on Lex Friedman, and he said they had a ratio of ~3 reports to one manager before they started layoffs, and he wanted that to more than double. He was talking more about engineering management there, but I have to imagine the PM ratio would be similar.

I have another question: why does a PM make more than a dev? My wife made that jump and her salary went up 50%. She literally just goes to meetings and talks now, yet she makes more than her old job that required real skills. Am I the only person who finds this perverse?

There was another post a while ago, that showed how all the money in Tech was gathering people from all other professions like Finance, Law, etc. And that's how tech workforces ballooned in the last decade, and exploded during the pandemic. Now a lot of that is being dialed down, with cost controls.

But, it's a result of where the money lies. And has been done in industries and periods past. Tech realized that every company needs to be honing their product strategy, it's not cool that your tech is awesome, but you need sell it. I think this group structure is more useful than the legacy agile/ with a scrum master model. PMs can steer the ship and handle all the roles of a business analyst, scrum master, and to some degree maybe even merge with an engineering manager (might be going towards that), but perhaps it was a good idea to separate engineering and product/business decisions.

In my experience, product management is an innate skill that is very hard to learn or teach. This is not to say that you can’t get better at it, just that it doesn’t involve the sorts of skills that are easy to teach in a classroom, it is more about real world experience. In order to be good at it, you need to be well organized, good at talking to people, have a good intuition for design, and a strong ability to understand the domain you are working in, as well as your users.

The best product managers I know seem to have a natural talent for it. And plenty of them found their way into it by accident. Maybe they were working in another part of the business, but realized that they had a knack for understanding how the product could be better. Maybe someone told them that they would be good at it.

My take on it is that yes, lots of people want to be involved in tech, but don’t know how to code. Product management is a Way to do that that’s accessible to non-engineers. Some people will try it out and find that they have strong abilities at it, and many will fail at it. But I think it is seen as a desirable job.

That said, I think it’s an incredibly hard job as well. You have to deal with people above you constantly pushing on deadlines, you have to stay super on top of things, and you won’t succeed, unless you earn the respect of the engineers you work with. It can be very demanding. Most people don’t seem to have the skill set for it. And if you are in a company with a bad culture, it can be a very thankless job.

This is a little scary to see as someone who is trying to switch industries and get into a product owner / manager position.

My background is very technical, but it's in the traditional IT industry and I doubt anyone would trust me to start writing code even though that's what I've been doing for the past 2 years. So I figured with my project management experience I can jump more easily to product management.

From my perspective it does seem like there are still a lot of roles open for product people, so I can understand why it seems like a lot of people are trying to jump.

Its an avenue for developers who don't want to code anymore and want to play scrum master. Prob 1/3rd of early career engineers are trying to get out of developer jobs into PM gigs.

My current company has a lot of domain experts from a specific industry that became product managers. It's been a mixed bag of results. They're obviously very knowledgable about the market we serve, but completely naive to the process of making software products. Clarity and appropriate levels of detail in requirements definitions and creating coherent "products" vs. clumps of features are the biggest challenges.

Fortunately, all are willing to learn and work together to figure it out.

I wish! I suspect I’d be good at it, but I have no idea how to get a PM job as a mid-career person with no useful network. I have 10 years experience in marketing, project/team management in nonprofits (good network in that industry) and a few years experience writing code too as a freelancer (but with some decent size projects and clients).

Admittedly, I haven’t tried too hard because the freelance work is very comfortable, but every time Ive applied for a PM role it’s been a total bust.

In times like these, when there is so much opportunity and so many use cases are easily recognizable due to the AI hype and so much information going around, anyone can be a product manager. When the tides turn and we enter the next AI winter, lots of these product managers will move on or be cut.

It's very easy to be a product manager in times like these, it's not easy being one where opportunity is rare and hard to find.

I became a product manager by accident while working as a lead designer. I developed a fondness for taking ownership of the product. At that time, I was also an engineer. Presently, I work as a CTO, and I have noticed that many product managers lack the necessary skills in engineering or design. Individuals from backgrounds such as Business Analysis, Marketing, or other managerial roles often excel as CEOs of a product.

What is a PM?

I'm told I am one. Because I am the manager of a piece of software the CTO has passed on to me.

Besides leading the develoment, what should I do?

It's an easy way of getting paid more while doing less actual work. Obviously most senior people want to become product managers since they know they will have more to say and get compensated for it.

Managing people is where the real money is vs. say, straight programming

the position definitely exploded in recent years, but a lot of the cuts in the last few months have been these types of roles as well. Facebook called out non-technical managers pretty directly with Zuckerberg saying even managers should be writing code and I think other companies are realizing that many PMs are net negatives. At the end of the day it's a luxury position, the role in a smaller startup would be handled by a founder or an engineer who likes talking to customers

I switched from being a professor of software engineering to being a PM in early 2022. I didn't know it was trendy though!

Making decisions on new features? Bad thing.

Doing the presentations and customer feedback on new features? Good thing. (Pls no I wanna die I'm a smol bean introvert dev it's the cost of knowing the Rule of Five I have no brain cells left to communicate I wanna die)

Product Manager sounds like a made up generic job title that covers everything from A-Q in the alphabet.

One thing I have consistently noticed that a mindset as a PM for any role goes a long way. This is why I am creating a "Think Like A PM 101" course that you can find here. https://www.pmacademy.co/offers/6MZoGJ9Y/checkout