From one piece This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) 15 beliefs · youtube.com
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korrents.com
Interviews reward presentation; only a hands-on case study shows how fast a candidate's thinking decays.Their words
the number of people who present incredibly well, and then you give them a prompt and some data and ask them to come back with a PRD on something, and then we make them verbally defend it, how quickly the thinking decays from folks who are good at the theater, but not the specifics, uh is kind of really telling, I think.
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Their words
absolutely agree that product skills are probably the most durable. My build would just be there's a lot of people who have the title PM who haven't spent a lot of time building those skills in the last 5 years, but have gotten really good at communicating frameworks to leadership.
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korrents.com
Needing fewer people per unit of output does not mean a company ends up employing fewer people.Their words
if you are using these systems right you can just grow more quickly you can build more things you can take on more stuff so you know I would be surprised actually if we ended up with like net fewer
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Their words
as a product manager, I've spent less time in the last year talking to a data scientist than I ever have in my career, even though I've probably spent 10 times more time in data and understanding actually how the product's working than I have ever have in my career.
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Their words
have I personally shipped some production code and whatnot? Yes. Uh do I think that's really the best use of my time? Not really.
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Their words
go and take the comp required to have five L5s reporting to one L7 and then four L7s reporting to one VP and now total the comp of that product org and turn around and say, what if I had three people?
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korrents.com
People who manage product managers should still spend almost all of their own time doing individual contributor work.Their words
There's like I think four or five people across the team who manage other PMs. All of them would spend 90 plus percent of their time doing IC work. I'm still probably 50% of my time doing IC work personally.
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korrents.com
The industry's promotion ladder took its best product people and promoted them out of doing the work.Their words
what you did if you were really successful as a PM is you got promoted into being a director and then all of a sudden it was like don't be hands-on anymore. Your goal goal is just to coach and guide. And so, we took all of our A players and then promoted them out of doing things.
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Their words
there's definitely a group of PMs and I certainly used to be one of them earlier in my career whose specialty wasn't technical or customer-oriented, it was politics.
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Their words
you can have one very senior PM across more things and they can be more efficient than having, you know, three relatively entry-level PMs.
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Their words
rather than mapping PMs to teams where you kind of assume that the PM will always do that, we tend to map them to kind of problems or kind of like core projects.
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korrents.com
The engineer-designer-PM pod ratio was an HR artifact of scaling, not something anyone showed a product needed.Their words
somewhere along the line this kind of HR ratio of like a pod popped into being. You know, every time you hire six engineers, you add a designer or you add a PM, you add an EM
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designproduct managementhiring
Their words
hiring so many PMs infantilizes the engineers and the designers who are perfectly capable of making good decisions, but just never had to because there was always a PM to babysit them.
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Their words
The only argument as far as I'm aware for why you would want product management to be a specialist function is really it's a trade, not a qualification.
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korrents.com
A company should hire a product manager only against a specific need, never by default.Their words
we articulate it that way to kind of force ourselves to remember that you don't hire a PM just for the sake of hiring one, you hire one with a really specific need.