Why people don't like Product Managers

I recently attended p-camp, a fantastic get-together for product managers from all over the US. Hidden among sessions in the vein of "Agile Now!" and "Can you be more Agile?" and "Agile and Scrum: How to be more Agileriffic" there was a gem of "The Future of Product Management" where we explored where the career of Product Manager was and where it was heading. And what I quickly realized was that people don't like us much.

Come again?

Ok, people like PMs as individuals just fine. (Well, people seem to generally like me, and seem to like the PMs I've worked with) But in general, there is a greater than average distrust of the PM as a role in an organization. As it turns out, there are some perfectly valid reasons.

1. Engineers: don't like being told what to do (who does, really), and they don't like having to guess how hard something is before digging into it. And they really hate having to stop work on one thing and switch to another. "Agile" was coined to help with this, but there is still tension between any engineering driven effort and a PM driven effort. Take Google – the PMs are far lower on the totem pole than the Engineers. Another (unnamed) company, I walked into an interview and was bluntly told "The engineers may take some winning over; they think you are here to take away their fun."
2. Execs: don't like handing over the care and feeding of their brilliant idea to PMs, a painful step in the growth of the organization. It also gives them pause that maybe, just maybe, the strategy and core of the company isn't 100% perfect from the start, and may need refinement and reevaluation as things continue to evolve. Execs don't like that feeling, confidence is part of how they got to be executives.
3. Sales: Can't understand why the PM would do anything other than what the sales team needs to do to close the deal, after all, what good is planning for the company's future if there is no future?
4. Legal: Wonders why the PM has so much trouble keeping the plan away from any legal gray areas - shouldn't legal trump sales?
5. Project Managers: Hate being confused with PMs, and know deep down that if the PMs suddenly vanished, they would be able to keep the ship running for quite some time.

On top of these reasons, we don't let new people in the club, which really makes "them" not trust us. An engineer in the session asked "How do I become a product manager?" The best answer the group came up with was "You don't!" – which works great for annoying non-PMs, making it harder to approach PMing as a career, and generally making things difficult for everyone involved. However, it is, unfortunately, correct. No one starts out as a PM, you were something else first (marketer, engineer, sales rep, etc) and you migrated over to being a product manager. As they say – "you can't get thar from here!"

So, what can we as a group do? We came up with a few items.

• More certification: Something like a black-belt-5th-level-agile-enabled-paladin class for product managers would be a start, let the market filter out if it actually helps.
• More publicity: press harder to get recognition when things go well! You hear about "Company X has great engineers" and "Company Y has great sales" but when have you ever read an article in wired of "Company Z has fantastic product management?" Ok, aside from Apple.
• Keep "How" vs "What" very clear:  Getting along with engineering is all about drawing lines between the "how" and the "what" of the product, and having both sides admit when they wander across the line.
  

Even after such clarity in a session, I still love being a PM. I dig the looks of incredulity from the Engineers when I say "yes, I really do like coordinating what you are doing with sales, marketing, testing, the content team, and the execs." I love being able to see the product evolving, swirling, taking shape as a fuzzy strategy focuses into a set of requirements and is transformed into a shippable feature set. And I love being able to say "I brought all of these experts together… and together, just look at how big an impact we made."

Serious "get out of bed each morning" pull. Just the way I like it. And who knows - eventually people might like us!

Originally Posted January 30, 2009