I believe in self-organizing teams that own a product. Companies get their best work done when their engineers not only care about the product but are in a position to shape and design it.
That doesn't mean engineers should be the only ones to decide what gets built. Far from it. It does mean their voices and problem-solving skills are respected and put to work.
In my corporate days, I saw too many developers translating tickets from Jira to Java without the mandate to ask real questions. Thinkers would spell out these tickets, and the doers would implement them. When it turned out they built the wrong thing, the thinkers would think harder and the doers started over. We've since learned that the separation between thinkers and doers leads to mediocre products.
These days, we no longer start from business analysis or requirements gathering. These days, we rely on the noble art of Product Management. Rather than just building what we think we need, a PM will capture feedback and turn that into a prioritized plan.
When agile software development became the norm, something changed in management circles as well. Now that the developers were at the center of the process, the manager's role was under pressure. The project management concepts that worked wonders in the days of the Rational Unified Process weren't that well-equipped to handle the new feedback-driven flow. For years, the industry struggled to find something that worked, and modern-day Product Management methodologies seem to be the outcome. They are part agile software development, part Lean Startup.
A good PM is worth their weight in gold and companies should work hard to hire and train the right ones. There is however, a worrying trend that needs to be countered.
The value of the Product Manager role is being inflated to ridiculous proportions online. Companies that peddle services and courses present the PM as some kind of Product Guru. They are "strategic" and "visionary". They have to define the product vision and guide the team into following the right track. The most ludicrous variant of this definition paints the PM as the "CEO of the product”. Talk about hubris!
We've seen this before. The Scrum Master went from a team-level position to a "strategic partner advocating for business agility in the entire organization". Of course that's nonsense. Companies don't hire Scrum Masters to "coach the organization". They hire them to support team processes. But read the online rethoric about that role and you would start to believe Steve Jobs was a Scrum Master.
The same superhero arc is now projected on the role of Product Manager. And it's bad for our industry because we don't need more gurus. We need better leaders.
Product Manager is a management position. It's in the title. It's not a Product Visionary or Product Guru job. It's plain old reliable boring management. And that's extremely valuable.
A manager gets the best out of their team by following up when necessary and getting out of the way when possible.
In my work with startups, I see a wave of PMs who have been told they need to have the answers and the questions alike. I see them writing lengthy Product Requirements Documents as if we took a time machine to the 80s. We seem to devolve to PMs writing overly detailed Jira tickets with acceptance criteria. We're en route to seeing them add UML diagrams by 2028. This must be stopped.
It's not a manager's job to tell the team what to build. It's a manager's job to align stakeholders, set expectations, and keep track of the plan.
A Product Manager should identify, investigate, and describe problems while giving their teams the tools to devise the best solutions.
More planning, less solutioning.
More alignment, less micromanagement.
Yet there's a clear trend of them taking up the position of thinker again, telling the doers what to build. Yesterday’s mistakes are being made again today.
And after all these years, that still leads to terrible products.
It's a very valid call out of a risk. And it really diverges the real purpose of good product management.