The failure of Product Management

Throughout my career I have worked with many Product Managers, few of which have impressed me. Let me explain why.

Topics:

- I will probably upset many Product Managers with this episode, but I feel many need to hear this feedback. So here goes...
- Over time, Project Managers morphed in Product Managers, but it's still the same guys after a re-brand.
- They don't manage people and therefore do not have to do career planning and mentoring: instead, they manage scope and time-lines.
- To a typical PM, a person working on their project is a "resource".
- I honestly hate that term! Please don't use it.
- For a PM, a resource is an input and the product being released on time is the output.
- It's like coal in the furnace: we are but fuel for an engine.
- As a leader, I despise this mentality that threats people in such a transactional way.
- Sadly however, it is all too common especially in the tech field that is riddled with PMs.
- There is the old joke that "a PM thinks 9 women can deliver a baby in a month", but honestly that joke does reflect the thinking of some of them.
- As an engineering leader, the vast majority of my conversations with PMs revolve around them asking me for "more resources as my deadline is close, and at risk".
- They threat their relationship with me in a transactional way also: it’s all about what they need from me, and when.
- And they ALWAYS assume that adding more people will make it better.
- They never acknowledge that adding more people will slow things down in the short term, as existing team members have to spend time on-boarding the new team members into the project, while overall communication overheads increase with more people.
- As an aside, the inverse relationship of adding more people to a late project slowing it down was explored in the classic book “The Mythical Man-Month” by Fred Brooks, all the way back in 1975!
- This observation was codified as “Brook’s law”, and right now I am living it. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law
- In all of those decades, many PMs have not learned this lesson from Fred Brooks.
- In addition, they NEVER want to revisit the scope of their road maps. Their road maps are precious, while the people working to deliver them are not!
- You can probably tell by now, I've had a bad week...
- Truthfully, if you give me the option of hiring more engineers or PMs, I will choose more engineers every time.
- The hardest part of being a PM in a large enterprise is stakeholder management and securing budgets for a project business case.
- But honestly speaking, neither require specialist skills and can be handled by any competent manager with good communication skills and business acumen.
- Often positioned as a middle layer between engineering and business stakeholders, product management can add more noise than signal to some conversations, especially around technology.
- I prefer to get my senior engineers and team leads onto calls with business stakeholders instead, as its good for my engineers to get a better understanding of the business requirements and user pain points directly.
- Meanwhile, the business stakeholders get to see that it is real people building their applications for them, and not just nameless "resources" mentioned in a PowerPoint or Excel by a PM.
- Engineers are people too you guys.
- If you are a PM and you made it this far into the episode, you are one of the good ones!

Episode link: https://techleader.pro/a/697-The-failure-of-Product-Management-(TLP-2025w24)

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