I’ve probably listened to this band more than any other. I was born and raised in Los Angeles and grew up on it along with similar bands. I actually ran into Fat Mike totally randomly out in public this past year. I introduced myself, he’s a nice guy and exactly what you’d expect.
Maybe he's changed, but he was real entitled in Seoul back in 2007\08. Guy from the band RUX -- who owned a punk club in hongdae and a tiny DIY record company -- tried bringing him over and he was an elitist princess. I can distinctly remember the slackers were the opposite and they stayed in a hostel popular with the locals. Mike wanted big money and a four star hotel experience. Which I think they eventually got just for him (out of their own pockets). I wouldn't get a job either if I got to jet around the world and stay in baller hotels on somebody's dime.
I study for an hour every morning on a subject I enjoy right after I finish my first cup of coffee - right now I’m learning Japanese but I’ve done other things like building apps or reading history books. Main thing is always making sure it’s something I’m personally interested in, and I don’t multithread. Interestingly time bounding myself makes it more fun because I look forward to coming back to it vs getting tired of it
It matters at a certain level that most don’t reach.
I used to play pool a long time ago and there was one player that was far and away the best in the billiard hall. He would always say, “It’s the Indian not the Arrow” when people would come in with their fancy personal pool cues. To make his point he would grab the most warped pool cue off the wall and generally beat anyone he went up against.
The saying isn’t PC these days but the lesson did stick with me.
Isn't it the opposite? It matters none to the outliers because they're so far above the competition, but it matters at least significantly to the average person.
The Indians also spent expertise fletching decent arrows, for that reason.
“An inside look at the dizzying rollercoaster ridden over recent years by prodigy Iddo Gino and his unicorn Rapid, which he founded at the tender age of 17.”
The inconvenient truth is that the business exists not to provide engineers with work they’re happy with or proud of but to make investors money. The good news is developer happiness is associated with increased productivity and reduced attrition which usually factors into the business calculus in a much bigger way.
> The inconvenient truth is that the business exists not to provide engineers with work they’re happy with or proud of but to make investors money.
First that’s not always technically true because not all businesses have investors.
But assuming that the primary purpose is to make money, even that’s not precise since there’s a massive difference on optimizing for ROI tomorrow vs next quarter vs when you retire and hand your business over to others. Or different metrics altogether like market share or “engagement”. Those are all conflicting goals and have changed a lot just in a decade.
But even if you decide precisely which metric to aim for, there’s still a giant difference between primary purpose and only purpose. Simple things like a circuit breaker or a nail might be single purpose. But as soon as you step up almost everything is multi-purpose. A car, a house, even a hat have many degrees of freedom. A business has many unquantifiable components.
Anyway, the point is that giving carte blanche to decisions labeled with “business reasons” is at best lazy, and at worst legitimizes a sort of pseudo religious cargo cult worship of the “business truths” of the current year.
The truth is that nobody sits on magical predictive abilities, neither the 10x engineers nor the MBA grand poobahs. But it’s also clear that the companies with technical leadership and/or a high degree of engineering agency have been so successful in the last two decades, to the point of redefining the nature of business itself.
If I form a business and take no outside money, I am the investor, particularly in the context of GP’s point that “[businesses exist]…to make investors money.”
And money to get the company started. Even before a dollar of revenue comes in, lawyers, accountants, and the state need to be paid, and someone has to front or pay for the real estate. And employees are guaranteed a wage, unlike founders. These differences are often overlooked, seemingly out of convenience for the argument.
Non-financial businesses generally exist to provide goods and services. If FedEx stops delivering packages and provides no other goods or services, does it really need to exist?
I work in one of those environments and we do have those people (lawyers). The next question is how should we prioritize solving for potential legal risk vs reliability risk vs new feature work. You’d expect it’s black and white, I promise you it’s not. The PM has to figure that out.
I agree with the point you’re making. I wonder if there’s a disconnect here based on the size and complexity of some of the businesses different commenters are working in.
Probably. My employer has >5000 employees, ~2500 of whom are in the CTO org. We serve an international market, so there’s simply no way for a team of engineers to deeply understand all the regulations that impact their area.
I wonder what the author might suggest as an appropriate ratio of PMs to engineers might be. I generally like 1 per 10 person team. I also like the idea of not having a separate product tool but have yet to see a good tool that can satisfy software project management (eg Jira, Linear) and product ops (product board, Airtable).
There’s no doubt that smart watches offer way more functionality than a mechanical watch which is appealing to most consumers. However, what you’re buying with mechanical watches is more a form of art these days, and, for certain watches (eg Rolex) a status symbol. As someone who has always been drawn to watches (of all kinds), I really enjoyed this article. I even took off my watch (Omega Planet Ocean) and peered through the exhibition case back to take a look at the balance wheel and double barrels. Thanks for sharing!
Confusing article. “We should get rid of the PM role” but also “We still need people dedicated to do PM things… but don’t call them PMs, they’re just everyday great people.” I feel like the author had a bad experience working with a PM (the MBA comment is telling) and now wants to throw the baby out with the bath water. Business scale creates + requires role specialization. Sure, there are shitty PMs, and it’s a hard job, but I’d be super disappointed to lose my team’s PM.
Definitely sounds like a bad PM experience, especially with the repeated insistence about handing control of the company over to the PM.
Maybe I just have good experiences with PMs? At my company they're there to figure out what customers want and what the product should deliver, and then with our EMs to balance that with what's technically feasible and what we have capacity to implement. If an EM says "there's no way we can do that on this timeline" the PM works out some alternative plan for the product.
Yeah the "handing control of the company over" thing struck me as odd as well. I haven't ever seen that particular problem.
In the good cases I've seen, it's just as you describe, with EMs and PMs working together with high trust to get to a decent level of consensus between them, and then parlaying that consensus into leadership buy in for their roadmap.
In the bad cases, there is some breakdown in trust between the EM, PM, or leadership. Or, worse, between the EM and their team.
But I haven't run into this thing where the PM reigns supreme, above the leadership team.
Handing the company over to PMs is a very common problem I’ve seen at smaller startups.
It’s generally not that they are above the leadership team, but that that the leadership team have abdicated responsibility for product development to the head of product.
I think what I described is system where PMs have huge influence on what gets built. But also a system where engineering and strategic leadership also do. Personally that seems like the the balance to me. I think all three things - tactical product decisions, execution decisions, and strategic decisions - are important and separate.
An extremely common organisational leadership failure mode is “[role/thing] is useless, get rid of it… Ooops, we actually needed that. Bring it back, but call it something else so that we don’t have to admit our mistake.”
The author has, apparently, decided to skip the intermediate step and just rename things for no reason.
It also says that you just build teams where everyone is amazing (good luck pulling off that piece of recruiting magic) and then says “… give them good problems to solve…”
Who exactly does the author think should decide what problems the team should prioritize? That is the primary responsibility of the PM role. Seems like the author has indeed just had a bad experience with a PM who failed at that.
I've been lucky to work with a series of really good product managers, with one exception who thankfully didn't last long enough to do too much damage (though he did result in me having to attend the single most awkward meeting I've ever had to attend, where right from the top, and throughout the entire hour, he was demonstrating to his skip level manager that he really didn't understand the product at all, and the skip level did).
They help us out a lot by understanding what the customers want, what we can provide, what time lines are sane, handling interacting with legal and business interests galore, and I help them out when they need to check in on technical sides of things. Teams rarely lack for ideas of things they can build, ways they can improve the product or operational experience. A product manager tries to make sure you build the right thing.
I truly wish (and I know some do) that MBA programs had an industry experience prerequisite.
I have 20 years IT experience. I'm a PM. I'm looking to do an MBA for knowledge, learning about more formal business understanding, etc., and to help as I advance.
The PMs I know who are similar don't get an MBA and immediately start playing fuckfuck games (to borrow from military parlance). It's those who went high school > college > MBA > managerial role, without a day's experience in the field except maybe a brief internship half way through their undergrad.
I never understood black and white thinking such as OP.
“Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.” - Morgan Housel
Its the same with dating. If you date toxic people, you start generalising that all men are abusive.
Same with PMs. If you are working within a company that accepts subpar talent, you'll start seeing things based on your benchmark of quality. Until you actually work with a great PM that makes your life easier.
Yeah, and then they go on to say that all of the great sages weren't PM's, just great people.
I disagree. All of those greats that were mentioned succeeded because they kept the customer and the product tantamount to all else. So really they were just fantastic PM's.
