September 10, 2025 • 49 mins
Is Product Management the most unrealistic job description ever created?
Product Managers are supposed to be the "CEO of the product" - a one-person army who is CEO, therapist, engineer, and strategist (all without equity or authority). The only issue is that it sounds terrible and is a modern recipe for failure.
Watch as Brian and Om dive deep into the impossible expectations placed on Product Managers. Listen as we talk through how the role expects you to work 60+ hours minimum, handle everything from technical architecture to customer support, and somehow maintain strategic vision while putting out daily fires.
The reality?
Most PMs have responsibility without authority and get paid for one job while doing five. We explore the industrial complex that perpetuates these unrealistic expectations and discuss what needs to change.
🔥 Key Discussions Include:
- The myth of "CEO of the product"
- Sensationalizing the 60-hour work week
- Exploitation (aka. human Swiss Army knife)
- Power dynamics in modern Business
- $$$ (industrial complex) perpetuating the status quo
Whether you're a PM drowning in responsibilities or a leader wondering why your PM "doesn't communicate enough," this episode will give you plenty to think about.
#productmanagement #Leadership #AgileCoaching #WorkLifeBalance #ProductStrategy #TeamDevelopment #OrganizationalDesign
LINKS
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@arguingagile
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596
Website: http://arguingagile.com
INTRO MUSIC
Toronto Is My Beat
By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)
CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
what if I told you that there'sa job where you can be expected
(00:02):
to be the CEO without equity,the therapist, without training
and the engineer withoutcoding time or skills and
the strategist, but withoutauthority, all while working
60 hours a week minimum.
Cool.
Sign me up.
Well, that job isproduct management.
Andy Dufrane gothis rock hammer.
that job is product management.
(00:23):
And it's a job description,like it was generated by AI
that was exclusively trainedon motivational posters.
I that it wasn't very good.
I do have to say I wrotedown like, I have a
dozen, and I was like, no.
Oh, these all suck.
Oh my God.
Let me treat you tosome of the other ones
that also are terrible.
Product management.
The job description where itlooks like someone threw a
bunch of MBA textbooks intoa blender and hit puree.
(00:44):
Nice.
I like that.
Is that one betteror worse than that?
That sounds better.
A lot of people aredrinking that Kool-Aid.
So...
product management it wasa job description that was
written by someone who theironly work experience was
playing the Sims on easymode in the late nineties.
Ooh, I like that one.
That was a good one.
That's one.
Much better.
So today we're asking ifthe product manager role is
(01:06):
fundamentally broken or if youneed a strong generalist that
has a lot of experience in alot of different areas and also
is willing to work 60 hours.
I think the fad is everyonehas to be a specialist.
We need a generalist that'ssolidly grounded with their
experience and it keeps goingback and forth, I guess.
I'm your host productmanager, Brian Orlando.
(01:26):
This is, this is yourco-host your co-host.
My co-hosts everyone's co-host.
This is everyone's co-hostenterprise Business
Agility Consultant.
And the original Sultanof Swing.
Ooh, Mr. Om Patel.
No Swing.
We're the Sultan.
Oh, the consultants.
Oh, are we?
Oh, no, I'm gonna s Is thatthe rest of the podcast?
We're just goingthrough the lyrics.
Not gonna sing it.
This is, that would'vebeen a funnier intro than
(01:47):
what I did as the intro ifyou overlay music on that.
Yeah.
Just to weave the sultans ofswing into the whole intro.
Welcome back to Arguing Agile.
Remember like, and subscribe.
If you like this podcast oryou think you get something
out of it like, and subscribe.
Let's talk about theimpossible job description
of product management.
Neil Mc, Elroy Modern.
PM Neil Mc Elroy.
Modern PMs are expected tomaster business strategy,
technical architecture, designthinking, systems thinking,
(02:08):
design thinking, right?
Yeah.
Data analysis, stakeholdermanagement and communication.
Be sales people.
Go out and visit everysingle one of your customers
in the first whateverwhatever the advice is.
Working 60 hours a weekinvolved in strategy, p and
l, financials, marketing.
That's the job description.
You can't do all of those thingsin 60 hours to begin with, but
(02:29):
also you're assuming one personhas the wherewithal to actually
get their head around all that.
I was gonna say, you'relike, well, you can't, one
person can't do all that in60 hours in a, in a week.
And what I, what I heardin my head was, one person
can't do all that period.
Like Yeah.
Well that's true too.
Those jobs, some of thosejobs are gonna get dropped.
This is you productmanagers out there.
If you hear Brian, you'rejust not communicating enough.
(02:51):
What's going on?
I'm like, oh really?
I'm not like into my office sitdown, sit in the kid's chair.
No, not the adult chair.
Like sit down.
Oh, what do you mean?
You mean while I'm doing salesor while I'm doing technical
design and architecture?
Or while I'm doingbusiness strategy.
Because those are alldifferent audiences right
there, and the sales teammay not care about like.
We have to have this planto leave some technical debt
(03:11):
on the table versus knockingoff some technical debt.
And we need to go a littledeeper in the architecture,
talk about where we'regonna be a year from now.
And sales is gonna say, what,what do you care about that?
Right.
I'll say, Hey,it's, that's my job.
I'm the CEO of the product.
The product.
Yeah.
All of this is gonna bemy, my responsibility when
it comes quarter four.
And you're tryingto push that sale.
And anyone will say like,well, Brian, it's kind of
(03:33):
a ridiculous point you'rethrowing out right now.
You can just push itoff and do it later.
Yeah.
Prepare it later.
Sure.
So now, now you're tellingme how to do my priority.
Like, this is where theproduct management, like
this is where you lose.
It's like there's always gonnabe somebody in the business.
Because you're, you mightbe the CEO of the product.
Right.
I'm gonna keep sayingthat flagrantly, because
I, I enjoy saying that.
'cause I, nobody, nobodywith real experience believes
(03:56):
you're the CEO of the product.
Yeah.
Because of what I'm talkingabout is like, well, if I make
a decision and it de optimizessales, now the VP of sales is
gonna scream at me and thenmake me change my decision.
And then if I change thedecision, now the VP or CTO
is gonna come down and belike, this is ridiculous.
You know, again, then they'regoing to yell at me for,
and now quote Brian doesn'tcommunicate well enough.
That's what, that's, that'sthe way it's gonna manifest.
(04:18):
The person who comes downon you, the first is gonna
start the chain, right?
Yeah.
So you're gonna start spendingmore time communicating if
that's what you're accusedof not doing enough.
But then very quickly CTO inthis example will come back
and say, architecture's a mess.
They can't continueto do it this way.
We're gonna drown intd. All of this stuff.
(04:39):
Should you really even be askedto do all of those things on
top of trying to strategizethe path forward with your
product that you're the CEO of?
Or should you be able tooffload some of that work?
Maybe not communicatingto the customer, because
that should be your job.
One that's like, that shouldbe you leading that, but
maybe the technical stuff youcould offload to someone else.
(04:59):
the point that I canhear clearly now, someone
screaming at their tv Iwas gonna say screaming at
their tv, like their grandmain the eighties over here.
Like, ah, turn the tv.
Don't be throwingthe remote at the tv.
Oh man, the clicker sorry.
The arguing point will bewell, Om, that's ridiculous.
Like no one said you had todo all those things like, you,
you but, but it's your job tofacilitate All those things.
(05:22):
So now , you don't really havecontrol of any of the work.
You're just hoping that yourepeat the message enough
where people get sick ofhearing you and then, they
help you do it or whatever.
That's certainly true ina situation where you have
absolutely no authorityover these peers of yours.
Yeah.
You're trying to influencethem the best you can, but
you really can't controlwhat they do 'cause they
(05:42):
have other priorities.
You know what helps with that?
Controlling thefinances, that helps.
It helps a lot.
That certainly helps when youcome to the end of the year and
you're like, I give engineeringthis much money for this much
staff, or whatever, or I paymarketing this much to promote
by products, and then you'renear the end of the year and
you're like, you know what?
I see a downturn in marketingquality or engagement online
or whatever numbers that youare using the measuring, and
(06:03):
you say, look, guys I am realconcerned about the quality
I'm getting for the moneyI'm putting this department.
Because again, I assume theplace that like you work it
at, or I assume the place thatyou work at is a PM where you
don't control the finances.
There is some, like silois going on that is a
lot of places like that.
Right.
So yeah, I agree.
And there are those placeswhere you are not funded
(06:24):
adequately to begin withon some of those things.
And consequently, youdon't come through with you
don't meet expectations.
Yeah.
So your reward is they'regonna cut funding even more.
Yeah.
Well, on, on my other sideof the PM role obviously is
like impossibly overloaded.
And another point is ifyou're holding out for someone
with all these s skills,abilities, unicorn experiences.
(06:48):
Yeah.
You're basically holdingout for a unicorn.
Yeah.
So it's like you got your jobrole open or 700 applications in
24 hours and none of them fit?
I'm just wondering what,the typical product manager
on the market, like howmany years experience five.
Yeah, I was gonna guess at that.
Yeah.
Three to five years.
Three to five ismid-level they're saying.
I guess nobody could havethe statistic, but I, I'm
(07:10):
just wondering how manyproduct managers out there.
Oh, if anybody wouldhave statistics, it
would be McKinsey.
So this cpo club.com.
It's, it's citinga McKinsey study.
They did, but theydid it in 2014.
Well, no, this says pragmaticMarketing Inc. 2016 study
of almost 10 years ago.
Yeah.
It's, it's, it'slike nine years ago.
(07:30):
I mean, it is not great, but.
26% of product managers polledhad three to five work years
followed by 24% with six to 10.
Click on that link.
It says the rest,the report here.
Oh, oh, oh.
Let's see if, if it even opens.
Oh, there we are.
P, DF.
So this, are you seeingthis crap or, oh, sorry.
I dunno.
That's not cool.
(07:51):
I'm sure this study is great.
That's it.
That's the one.
So that's the one.
I don't know if you can,you can zoom that up.
I can zoom this alittle bit there.
Scroll it.
So people with under threeyears experience only represent.
19% of the respondents inthis study, and then nearly
everybody else is in themiddle of the distribution
between three to five years.
(08:11):
26%, six to 10 years, 24%.
And then over 10 yearsis a lot actually.
31%.
I didn't expect that much.
But also as you know, on thepodcast, this is 2016, and
these people are claiming tohave 15 plus years experience
in product managers.
They're claiming they wereproduct managers in 1999.
(08:32):
So I'm gonna say,let me see your data.
Yeah.
And fun.
Like, here's your ticket.
Like you've been pulledover by the fun police.
That's what I'msaying right now.
I don't believe it.
Well, listen, in the nine, nineyears since there's been an
awful lot of product managementcertifications been handed out,
so you don't know now, right?
How many product managersthat are out there.
(08:52):
They need to do anotherstudies I think an updated
version of it, but possiblywith fewer graphics.
I wanted to get some numbershere because I was gonna say,
you're looking for this unicornand if they even exist is beside
the point if they even exist,.
You're passing over likethat can do the job because
you have this unrealisticexpectation in your head because
(09:13):
you know, all the, these HBRarticles and Forbes articles
tell you that the CEO of theproduct should be able to
do everything, that's right.
Master with, with 25years of experience.
Yes.
Yes.
25 years experience in ai.
Because machine learningis not cool enough yeah.
Ai it's like machinelearning without the math.
Like there's a, I got, sorry.
(09:35):
There's a lot of like goodquips I could throw in here.
One thing that I didn't givecredence because again, I
hate the term CEO of theproduct is like the concept
being expressed is you havethe ownership like a CEO.
You take ownership of everythingthat you're involved with.
That's somebody arguingfor would point out to be
like, well, because the jobgets overloaded is because
(09:56):
we end up taking ownershipof all these things.
So you need to be a bettercommunicator and let people
know you're overloadedor get sidekicks as a
CO has, you're right.
Yeah.
Or hire people.
Except you're back towhere I was say yes.
Oh, you could hire peopleif only you had the budget.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
So I don't know this one.
(10:17):
On a scale of one to how,how many balls a circus
clown can juggle at onetime before dropping
them about four or five.
When they're not on fire?
No, no, they're all on fire.
Oh, well then maybe one.
Yeah.
So impressive to watch, butsomeone's gonna get hurt.
That's what I takefrom that category.
Speaking of gettinghurt, let's talk about
the 60 hour work week.
Even Marty Cagan Oh yeah.
(10:37):
He has a great quote in oneof his books that says, he's
not saying that you have towork 60 hours to be a good
product manager, but he issaying he's never met anybody
that he considered a greatproduct manager that worked
any less than 60 hours.
So in other words,you can work less.
If you wanna be a not so greatproduct manager, listen, you
can take weekends if you want.
(10:58):
If you want to be aloser, how dare you.
I took weekends last week yeah.
What the heck?
You want another weekend Om?
This is gonna exactlythis, this is gonna turn
to a trend at some point.
Next thing I have, thatnext thing you're gonna
ask for days off whenyou're having your baby,
you just gotta hustle.
Om.
You gotta hustle that.
That's my, I'm gonna, I'mgonna, I'm coming out the gate.
(11:21):
I'm coming out swinging true.
With this, against thishustle culture nonsense.
So if you're saying that like,no, Brian, one person must do
all these things, they mustfacilitate all these things.
I'm gonna say, well, one personcan't do all this, so you're
gonna get help for that person.
No, you're not gonna gethelp for that person.
I've never seen a productmanager, like an individual
(11:43):
contributor, productmanager with a staff
like a product operationspopped up for a second.
Same thing with uh, ux uh,researchers , right, they
extend the capabilities ofthe, of the UX person, because
in a good organization likeUX can't be a shared service
like ux, each team needs theirown UX person because they're
doing a lot of the offloadingof going out and, and talking
(12:05):
to customers and arrangingsessions and, and those
sessions need to be preppedwhen you talk to customers.
Who's gonna do that?
Well, the product manager'sgonna do it, right?
They can also be thegraphic designer 'cause.
Why not?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, in small companiesthey do, you know?
Mm-hmm.
They're doing Figma mockups andnow people online are clamoring
to just give them more AItools look under my jacket.
I happen to have an AI toolyou can buy, and you don't need
(12:27):
to hire a legitimate designerfor $150,000 or whatever.
My tool you can buy for $50,000.
And if you don't get theright solution the first
time, just keep tryingactually in an unlimited
amount of dollars because youjust spend tokens forever.
Right, right.
Yeah.
Sorry.
YouTube's really gonnapull that too, too.
(12:49):
Yeah, sorry.
YouTube they're the superpredators of 2025 AI companies.
That's what we're saying.
Where all the hitsof the eighties are
coming back in 2025.
Oh man.
This is becominga sassier podcast.
The issue here is MartyCagan's saying it.
Everyone's gonna listenand at least consider it.
When someone like Marty Cagansays it the executives will read
that in a book when they finallyget around to like, well, you
(13:10):
should read, inspire to know howproducts are supposed to work,
and they'll give it a shot.
And they'll read that andthey'll be like, oh, see here
it says they gotta work 60hours minimum to be successful.
That kind of stuffthat, it gives an
expectation that spreads.
And in and of itself sayingsomeone's gotta work more to be
more effective in this mainlycommunication based role.
(13:32):
I don't even necessarilyhave a problem with that.
My issue is like, I don'thave a problem with that.
But I'm at a point in my careerwhere like all those years of
like being in the office untilnine, 10 o'clock at night trying
to get a release together.
Mm-hmm.
You know, getting outearly with the customer and
ear, early mornings, latenights, that kind of stuff.
Entertaining all like,I, I've done all that.
(13:54):
I have the benefit.
All that's in thepast of my career.
And now I'm in the phaseof my life where I've
prioritized you know, familyand other things like that.
Yeah.
Now better got olderparents, stuff like that.
Like I, there's no way Icould have done what I'm
doing now in my personallife and all of that stuff.
So basically what you're sayingis don't have a personal life.
When I hear 60minimum, by the way.
(14:16):
Exactly.
That's what I hear.
I hear.
Don't have kids.
Like, you don't, don't moveyour relationships forward.
Don't be there for yourparents or whatever.
I think it's just this wholemysticism about having the work,
these endless hours, burningthe candle at both ends, burning
all your candles in a day.
It's ridiculous, right?
Yeah.
I mean, there's evidence, Iguess behind the other point
on here that Europeans don'tdo that, and yet they churn
(14:39):
out pretty good products.
So why us?
It's maybe just a local.
US based, right?
Or America is based.
Culturalism there around productmanagement that you have to keep
your nose to the grindstone.
Until the grindstone wears out.
It's ridiculous . thegrindstones gonna wear out.
Sure, sure.
It is.
(15:00):
You keep doing that kid.
Yeah.
Right.
Really what happens is it likethe cycle leads to burnout.
Burnout leads to turnover,and then rinse and repeat.
You know, we'll get anotherwhipper snapper in here.
Fresh.
Fresh.
I remember somebody once toldme , Brian, you need, you're
bringing in these candidates.
I need you to bringon someone fresh.
I was like, what does that mean?
I was like, are you telling meto not interview older workers?
(15:20):
Is that what you're telling me?
And they're like, oh, no, Iwould never say that, Brian.
But we need people with freshideas and people that are,
they're ready to jump in.
I remember this conversationlike it was yesterday.
It was a long time ago.
And I remember just like,not even skipping a beat,
, so you're telling me notto hire older people, is
what you're telling me?
No.
Yeah.
(15:41):
So the funny thing is, Iguess not really even funny.
That definitely not funny.
You could probably have thatsame conversation in several
companies today, right?
Bring somebody fresh in,bring in a new person
who has fresh ideas.
Like people with 3, 5, 10years of 15 years of experience
can't come up with fresh ideas.
Yeah.
How do you believe that?
(16:01):
It doesn't shock me becauseyour culture's a grindhouse
and if you don't changeanything, you're you're always
gonna do the same thing.
Bring in people, burn 'emout grind 'em down, burn 'em
out ship 'em out, get newpeople in, rinse and repeat.
Yeah.
That's not thenew ideas culture.
No, no, it's not.
The irony of that culturethough, is they think
they want to inspireinnovation by bringing
(16:22):
in new, new blood, right?
Yeah.
But actually what happensin reality is the opposite.
They're not innovating becausethey're burning people out.
These people getjaded pretty quickly.
You get someone else in,just give 'em some time and
then just keep doing that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then you turn around andthen you're that windsurf guy
that like was the engineer thatstarted there, and then Yeah.
(16:43):
He got nothing.
They're over here on, on socialmedia being like, oh no, all
of our people got compensated.
And he, and he'slike, he's like, whoa.
Oh, it's my stapler.
Like that was.
Yeah, we should go findthat video so we could
watch it where he is.
Like somebody had to trackhim down and interview him.
I, I don't, I don't know.
Anyway, track your working hoursand, and also like consider
(17:03):
when you have conversationsabout like something that
stress you out at work forthe day or when you're driving
or in the shower I do thisa lot when I am either about
to go to bed or when I firstwake up my brain rearranges
itself when I'm sleeping.
I solve architecturalproblems, when I'm either
laying down to bed, orwhen I wake up immediately
(17:24):
because when I wake up I cansolve issues in 20 minutes.
That I beat my headagainst for two hours.
Arrested.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That, that kind of stuff islike, oh, you're thinking
about a work problem and you'rethinking about what you wanna
do first when you get behindyour keyboard when you get down
with your daily community right?
Yeah.
Keep a little notepad with youat all times, like by the bed.
Keep it with you in your desk.
Keep it with you in your car.
(17:45):
And just jot down all thosetimes that you're working
on little tasks like that.
And then consider them work.
If you're a millennial,you could just say,
Siri, take a note.
Yeah, true.
You know, just write downall those times and then
consider them work, becauseI think you're gonna be
shocked that you're gonnaget to 60 hours pretty fast.
Keep track of all thatbecause you're gonna be,
you're gonna be shocked howfast you get to 60 hours.
What is, when someone'slike, you gotta work 60
(18:06):
hours, what does that mean?
You know, that, that,that's, that's another
side of like, long hoursare just table stakes.
The argument that I'm makingnow is these high impact roles.
Require high commitment, whenI was on contract you were
working with founders andfounders are willing to work
an unlimited amount of hoursI'm sure they were willing to
work all day long 'cause theyknew they were gonna just,
there something in it for them.
They were gonna cash outat the end of that rainbow.
(18:27):
They were gonna ca at theend of that train tunnel.
You know, their lightwas a pile of money.
Whereas this engineerover here, I should go
find 'em 'cause they'retalking about him so much.
Oh, I wish I could,oh my poor guy.
Anyway, that's whatthey're gonna claim.
And the founder in order totake you more seriously, you
gotta, when they're thereand when they're showing up,
you gotta be there with 'em.
I worked for a guy, he showedup the office, 6:00 AM.
(18:50):
He's like, there'sno way I can do work.
At home.
'cause my my family wouldlike see me up and wanna
talk to me and stuff.
And he was like divinginto like financial
numbers and statistics.
Right.
And he'd had to buildreports and stuff like that.
And he'd get in the officeat 6:00 AM and he'd have
productive just like the, justlike I do with development.
I started at like 6 (19:07):
45 AM and then between 6:45 AM
and 9 45, I have three hourswhere nobody talks to me.
That's all fine.
Except you shouldn't be doingthat at 6:45 PM also, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Look, just understandthat you have a life.
Everyone only has 24 hoursin their day, so you've
just gotta make the mostof your day in some form.
(19:30):
Right.
Work.
So what was that phraseI'm trying to remember.
Somebody said, do you work tolive or do you live to work?
Everyone has to answerthat for themselves.
Yeah, well hey, while you'reworking all those hours Mr. CEO
of the product you know, let's,let's talk about that fantasy.
(19:50):
Well, while you'regrinding, let's talk about
this pm as CEO metaphor.
it's been popular since BenHorowitz's 2012 blog post.
Let's go.
Let's go see ifwe can find that.
It says good product managers.
Let's see.
It's the Andreen Horowitz.
Horowitz.
Ben Har Horowitz.
(20:10):
Yeah.
So the metaphor, CEO, ofthe product, I guess it
originally came from thisarticle written in 2012.
Good product managersknow the market.
Let's see, let's read here.
Let's see.
A good product manageris a CEO of the product.
Oh, okay.
There it is right there.
Its the second sentence.
A good product manager takesfull responsibility and
measures themselves in termsof success of the product.
They're responsible forthe right, product, right
(20:31):
time and all that entails.
Bad product managershave a lot of excuses.
Not enough funding.
Engineering manager's an idiot.
Microsoft has 10 times asmany engineers working on it.
I'm overworked.
I don't get enough direction.
The CEO of the product,don't worry about how
much funding I give you.
Oh, you're the COof the product.
Why don't you suck it up?
It's funny that he prefacethe whole article by saying
(20:52):
it was written 15 years ago.
It's not relevant anymore.
that's ridiculous.
I think this whole thingcontradicts everything
else underneath it.
Probably.
Product managers createleverageable, collateral.
FAQs, presentation.
White papers, bad productmanagers complain.
They spend all day answeringquestions for sales.
Good product managers anticipatethe serious product flaws
and build real solutions.
(21:12):
Bad product managersput out fires all day.
There's a lot in thisthat I have an issue with.
Yeah.
Is that the wholearticle is good.
Good product managers do this.
Bad product managers do that.
I think that that'show it's formatted.
But there might be morebeyond the ad as surface.
No.
Oh, that's, no, that's it.
That's it.
Oh, okay.
I thought there was more.
(21:33):
Okay.
Well, if that's thecase, this may be about
a dozen things here.
Yeah.
That he decrees.
Good managers do andbad managers don't.
Good product managers sendtheir status reports on
time every week becausethey're disciplined.
Bad product managers forgetto send their status reports.
Why?
We send the statusreports Exactly.
In 2012, that's what they did.
I was over here talking tocustomers and selling yachts.
(21:54):
I mean, I'm just saying likeyou had budgets for yachts.
anyway, like, listen, youneed to just take ownership,
kid., Stop crying that youwant nights and weekends off.
Get back in there.
The point of what hesaid was CEOs take
responsibility of everything.
, Bold.
Statement.
, Bold claim in the modern erathat CEOs take responsibility.
Especially in light of,given that you don't
have everything you need.
You don't have the budget,you don't have the time and
(22:16):
the day to do everything,but you take responsibility.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But it, I mean, again, isn'the making my point for me of
like, good product managersjust figure out a way to do it.
We had the ExtremeOwnership podcast.
With a lot of this, wehashed that in that.
So like, I dunno how great ofa category this is, because
I could take product managerout of this and put any
other job position in hereand say oh, you're a good
(22:38):
product marketing manager.
Don't complain thatthe code is bad.
Get in there in a repoand start fixing things it
sounds ridiculous, right?
Yeah.
Because it is.
'cause it is ridiculous.
Thinking like a CEOencourages strategic, business
oriented decision making.
Articles like this framethe role as prestigious Hey,
you're the CEO of the product.
You're the main personthat decides everything.
(22:59):
Get in there kid.
You got the fame, you gotthe money, oh, you don't
have either one of those.
You also don'thave any authority.
So PMs have responsibilitywithout authority.
That's the bottom linefrom all of this stuff.
Yeah.
Yes.
That's the delusion here.
It's like you're notthe CEO of the product.
And that's, even he walksback that whole article and
says like, you know what?
This isn't reallyrelevant for modern PMs.
(23:21):
And he walks thewhole thing back.
And I would have to say heprobably got sick of getting
challenged with this oneis like, well, you have
no authority over anyone.
Right.
And the CEO can justdecide like, you know what?
I'm gonna take out a loanand move all my development
offshore and do whateverand not you and fire all
my engineers if they have aproblem consistently enough.
Sure.
And they will Absolutely.
That, that CEO hasauthority, right.
(23:44):
You're lucky to have influence.
Yes.
Yeah.
Your CE might come inand tell you what your
roadmap's gonna be.
Exactly.
And I would say that'sapplicable, more applicable
to most PMs than telling them,Hey, quit crying about how much
money you get from the business.
Don't worry about it.
Why you worry about that?
Right.
Just do the best you can.
Yeah.
Focus on that.
Showcase somethingsuccessful first and then
they might listen to you.
We're not gonna hire aQA department or customer
(24:04):
service department, or, ormore than one developer.
Yeah.
Go fix quality yourself.
Yeah.
You have total controlover what you put out.
Yeah.
Also get that thing donetoday, by the end of the day.
By the way, kid, I'm laughing'cause it's just so ridiculous.
Yeah.
Calling yourself a CEOof the product and you
can't even expense.
$500. A 500 tool.
Yeah.
(24:24):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Exactly.
You can't approve a, a cloudcode subscription or a Cloud max
subscription or whatever, right?
Yeah.
What, 200 bucks amonth whatever it is.
I don't remember what it was.
Yeah.
So, but you know what I cansee being attracted to this
is people that are ego-driventhat or just plain naive.
I mean, the ego-drivenfolks they could live in an
environment like this wherethey just blame everyone else.
(24:46):
Of course.
Yes.
You know?
Yeah.
I mean, they, theoreticallyyou should be taking
ownership, I just don't see itworking, is what I'm saying.
I just don't see it working.
It's tough for me tosee the other side here.
Because this is themost broken thing.
Every role and every companyhas a different mix of what
are you clearly accountablefor as a product manager?
What, what decisionshave been delegated to
(25:08):
you and what decisions.
Rest with the CEO or thedirector or whatever, some
other team or whatever, right.
If you're willing to write thatdown, then I'm willing to have
a real conversation about this.
But if you want the comfortof always being able to move
a goalpost when somethingmakes you uncomfortable.
Because, because again, likethe product manager is the
one that's supposed to be likegetting evidence and making
the evidence based decisions.
(25:29):
And when you run that up thechain and people want the
ability to mess around thedata or throw out certain
things to make certain casesand the, you know what I mean?
Like ego just doesn'twork in this, ego destroys
this whole that's why thiscategory, I, I'm not gonna
get over this category.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I, I'm, I'mwith you on that.
Definitely.
Alright, well I'm gonna setthe reality distortion field
(25:51):
to maximum volume and we'regonna move on to the next
category because this is a,ended up, I thought it was a
good category and the planningand it ended up being a terrible
category and now I'm depressed.
So speaking of the depressed.
Let's explore the human Swissarmy knife phenomenon of
the do do everything person.
That Modern PMshave, have found 'em.
So they're, they'recoding prototypes now
(26:11):
with AI tools, running qa,running customer support.
Doing all of their marketingpotentially themselves.
Working with sales.
Working with thedevelopment team with
architecture and design.
And they're doing featuresand they're and they,
they're one-stop shop.
Basically Jack of all trades.
Jack of all trades.
That's right.
That's cool.
I guess.
(26:31):
How do you, how do youfind people like this?
Well I will tell you it is mucheasier to make people like that.
So there we have hang up.
Number one in this category isnobody wants to train anymore.
So you thought I was gonna say,nobody wants to work anymore.
Didn't you just No, nobody.
No, no.
I knew where you were gonna go.
That's right.
With the training side of it.
Nobody wants to work atthe Salt mine anymore.
(26:52):
Getting your hands dirty.
Om that's what, that'swhat they'll say.
They'll say, Om, you justgotta get in there and
get your hands dirty.
We don't have, we don't havebudget for scrum masters.
We need people that are willingto get their hands dirty.
That's assuming you know whatto do when your hands are dirty.
Yeah, because I mean, some ofthese folks don't necessarily
have the chops to know what todo with their hands in there.
(27:13):
Right.
So what do you,what do you do now?
Like you said, they'renot being trained.
They're not being given budgetto go out and get trained,
but yet they're supposed to bejack of all trades, get your
hands dirty, get somethingturned out pretty quickly.
How do you do that?
How do you find these people?
Well, I'll tell youhow most people do it.
You create chaos and then goodpeople step up and fix it.
(27:34):
And then you take the credit.
That's how I've seenthe bad people succeed
in product management.
The argument here is, if yourteams are cross-functional and
they should be like argumentfor me you will start absorbing
some of that cross-functionalityover time if your teams
truly are cross-functional.
And I think as an organizationyou have to, you have to
have intent to get yourteams up to that level.
(27:57):
If you're not sure how getoutside help, well, if you're
not in control of any budgetand anybody, you have to go
beg somebody for every singlescrappy dollar or whatever,
this is like one of the firstthings that's out the window
you know, and then the otherthing is you have a little
bit of control of your time.
That would be the other thing Ihope is you have a little bit of
control over your time to maybeif they're not training you,
you can put some time aside tolearn some new skills on the job
(28:19):
training, that kind of stuff.
Yeah, I mean, again, likethe benefit of working
at a small company is youget to wear multiple hats.
Every employee gets to wearmultiple hats, but that's
just because a small companycan't hire the right people
to fill the positions.
And Yeah.
You're being asked to domultiple jobs, basically.
But this is doing multiple jobs.
Right, right.
Well, there's a word for that.
We'll get to it in thenext category, I'm sure.
(28:41):
But yeah.
Doing everyone else'sjob, that's not on the job
training that's when you'redoing everyone else's job.
Designing.
We're not gonna hirea UI ux designer.
The product manager's gonna doit all we're not gonna hire a UX
person to help do interviews andsurveys and capture feedback and
to make meaningful interactionsbetween the customers.
We're gonna have the productmanager do that, or the
dev team do that, right?
(29:02):
And they're not gonna getany help from a professional
like that was, yeah.
But what you're really doing islike, the more of the stuff that
I said before, like customersupport and marketing stuff,
and you doing QA and doing allthese AI assisted prototypes
and whatnot but where'sthe actual business like.
PM skills being used.
Where's that?
(29:22):
Is that stuff getting minimized?
Like where's ourbusiness strategy?
How does the producthook into that?
How is the product gonnaadvance the business strategy
over the next two years?
Where's our long term, likeall the stuff that I think of,
like when's the pm Like hittingthe street to help expand their
knowledge of the business.
Alright, let someoneelse do that.
Well, I think someone else,I think someone else wants
(29:44):
someone else to do that.
Exactly.
And they don't wantthe PM to do that.
Yes.
Yeah.
The more of this stuff thatgets thrown on the PM to do the
less actual PMing gets done.
And by PMing what people willbe like, well Brian, that's
a pretty squishy statement.
You need to like quantifythat, but gimme some things
that the PM would do.
I don't know.
How about business strategy?
Who else is gonna do it?
Competitive analysis.
(30:05):
How about, keeping your eye openabout trends in your industry.
Mm-hmm.
You know, going to how longdoes it take to read all your
latest industry publicationsor blogs or follow all
the people that are, atthe edge of your industry.
Like if you're in governmentthat's constantly, PhDs
are constantly puttingout research papers about
things that may be relevantto you and your industry.
You need to be on theedge of that stuff.
(30:25):
'cause you go to a conferenceand stuff, people are gonna
talk about, you're not gonnaknow what they're talking about.
So like, all of that.
Staying ahead.
Normally that time is spenton nights and weekends
and I'm saying considerall that work time now.
Right.
Because it's work time.
It's all work.
I agree.
This stuff like keepingan eye on the regulatory
changes in your industry.
(30:46):
Right.
Yeah.
Because if you're blindsidedby that, well, it doesn't
matter what you're building.
I gotta imagine that likelawyers and stuff are like,
they're keeping an eyeon what cases are going
through the court right now?
You know, especially federal,well, I mean, federal lawyers
or their own brand of lawyer,but yeah, they're probably
constantly keeping an eyeon who made what decision
when, . See where the windsare blowing type of stuff.
(31:07):
This is the same thing, exceptit's not an extra thing you do.
It is a job.
It is the job.
Yeah.
It's a job to make sure thatyou, you're not gonna get
lapped by your competitorsand that the market is not
gonna move on without you.
And if nobody'sflying that plane,
there's only one parachute.
Again, if you're gonna talkabout taking ownership of stuff
and get on that high horse andsaying you need to be taking
(31:28):
ownership, I can't trust that.
Like, because people have arandom VP director title that
they're doing these jobs.
Right.
I want them to bedoing these jobs.
Yeah.
They themselves alsoprobably have 15 things
that they need to be doing.
At a time.
In addition to peoplemanagement, which didn't
even appear on anythingin this list so far.
Right.
Actually managing people.
The takeaway in this categoryis like, start marking down.
(31:53):
Like write down the tasksthat you do during a week.
Right.
Or even in a day.
Like, try it for one day.
Like, write down just alist of like everything that
you do oh, I facilitated adiscussion about this, or I
made a decision about whatever.
You know, really thinkabout what you are doing,
like research a littlebit into this or whatever.
You know really think about likestep back and think about like,
how to explain what you havedone to somebody that doesn't
(32:14):
know anything about technicalor business or whatever.
Explain what you'redoing to a child.
Write it down on the line andthen when the day is over and
you're ready to go to bed.
You'll be able to look backat the list to note every task
that you did and then decide didthis task get me ahead or did
this task get the product ahead?
That's what I'm lookingfor is what are the non PM
(32:35):
tasks that you're doing?
I even, when we released anew version, I did a little QA
test like that gets the productahead because we gotta make
sure it's quality or whatever.
I'm like, that's not reallywhat I'm talking about.
That didn't reallyget the product.
Like, it reallysignificantly launches you
forward into the future.
I don't think so.
And you know this suggestionof making a list of all of the,
not my job things allows youto do something else, right?
(32:58):
It allows you to look back andsay, I did all of those things.
Fine.
Should I have been doing that?
Who really should be doing?
Just add anothercolumn next to it.
Yeah.
And then see if you canleverage that list, because
now you have evidence, right.
With your with your C-levelfolks and say, we need
to get someone 'causeI'm carrying the load.
Right.
And if you're really doingthis right, add yet another
(33:19):
column to its right.
And say, what areyou missing out on?
Because you're doingthese things instead.
Right.
And you might have achance to convince someone
to get you some help.
And also if we're usingextreme ownership as a
weapon, 'cause that's whatI get outta this category.
Surely PMs are compensated likefounders that they're emulating.
Right, right.
Windsurf, sorry, sorry.
(33:41):
Listen, if they were, they mightbe able to justify working a
60 hour week days, hour weeks.
Right?
Because they, they say, well,there's something there for me.
But often they're not, youare basically making someone
rich at the end of the day.
Well, that's, I mean,that's, I like yachts.
That's what I'm saying.
I like looking at themwhile they sail away.
(34:01):
So listen, Om, we weara lot of hats here at
Brian and Ohm's startup.
We sure do.
We wear a lot of hats and we wegot yachts to buy, and there's
no way we're gonna buy 'em ifwe give away some of those hats.
I don't know why wewear so many hats.
Like I can only wear onehat at a time, I guess.
But the experience that you'llget working here is the reward.
I'm gonna pay you in exposure.
(34:22):
Sorry, I can't, these aresupposed to be four points.
Sorry.
I'm sorry everyone.
I'm sorry.
I'm supposed to be arguingon behalf the, the learning.
And the exposure todifferent learning
experiences is invaluable.
Ohm invaluable.
Absolutely.
We can only pay you 35 centsand four peanuts this pay cycle.
Wow.
(34:42):
Times are good.
So this kind of play might workwith some of the junior folks
that are entering the marketwhere you're saying, Hey look,
these are greener pasture comehither, more impressionable.
And as they walk across,they find themselves
sucked into the quicksand.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Experience.
Yes, of course.
Right?
You can't just washthat out and say there's
nothing to be gained there.
(35:03):
There is, however, experiencedoesn't pay your bills.
Oh, no.
Experience doesn't.
I was gonna say experiencedoesn't pay your divorce
costs because, 'cause you'vegotta burn yourself out
trying to get experienceunder the guise of this what
we've been talking about.
So it's not the be alland end all of everything.
So take that for what it is.
Take the experiencefor what it's worth.
(35:25):
But also at the sametime, understand why
you're doing this for you.
Right.
Longer term.
This is the word that Iwas looking for earlier.
I'm gonna drop it in thiscategory because it seems
appropriate in this category.
And that word is exploitation.
This goes back to theexample I said earlier in
the podcast of like, we needsomeone with more energy.
So what you're saying is youwould like to perpetuate the
(35:46):
cycle where we get young peoplein here pay them peanuts.
Give them this job title thathas this illusionary marketing
prestige built onto it.
Have them give usentrepreneurial effort at
entry level employee prices,and then keep doing that model
until we burn those people out.
The people who by the way,could have been utilizing
(36:09):
their entrepreneurial spirit tobuild companies of their own.
Sure.
And some do escape thetrap after a while.
So the unempathetic theunempathetic pushback to
this will be like, well,then they can go do that.
They can go do it.
They, they canquit and go do it.
Ohm, they should have done that.
And then said, you know thatthere's a lot of bad faith.
Pushback in this category.
Yeah, the other thing I thoughtof was that, oh, but nobody
(36:30):
wants the stress of equityand like having to go out and
make the sale to make payroll.
People don't want, they don'twant the ownership equity.
Oh yeah, sure.
It's, well that equitymay pay bills better
than your experience.
The side effect of someof these things, is
people get burned out.
They leave, they go to othercompanies and they try to
(36:53):
apply whatever they gainedfrom their experience, right?
Yeah , so if these arethe younger entry level
people, they probablyhaven't gained a whole lot.
Because at that age bracket,they value personal time,
et cetera, more than justtrying to do everything
for the mothership.
So they're gonna go toanother company and they
(37:13):
will try to apply that thereand good luck there too,
because it's the same culture.
Right.
Then what happens I'lltell you what happens
is you have no equity.
And if you're one of those youngpeople listening to this or
watching this and you think thegrass is greener on the other
side, lemme tell you, grassis greener where you water it.
We're coming to thesame takeaway with a
(37:34):
lot of these categoriesof, don't be a sucker.
You know, that that's what we'recoming to at the end of these.
Like that when, when, when Isaid earlier is like, write
down all the hours thatyou're thinking about work
and like thinking about ormulling over work decisions.
And then considerthose work hours.
When you're thinking aboutMarty Cagan's, like 60 hours,
I'm betting you're probablyworking 60 hours already.
You just don't considerif my butt's not in a
(37:55):
chair, in a cubicle, in anoffice, I'm not working.
Which by the way is, is that'show Jamie Dimon thinks about it.
If you're working from home,you're just playing, you're
playing the role home.
You're just playing at therole, you gotta be in the
office and then play the role.
That's right.
You gotta just sit, in theoffice and play solitaire for,
or get on Zoom calls like youcould have done from home.
(38:16):
That's true.
So the real founders thepeople with the equity they
have the control and withthis shiny title PM like
you have the illusionalcontrol, there are some
things you can do to fix that.
Obviously equity's betterbecause then when someone
running the business talksto you, they're talking
to you like a partner.
Mm-hmm.
'cause you have equity,right , versus talking to you.
(38:36):
Like someone that'son that burnout wheel.
Like, you're onlyhere temporary kid.
I don't care whatyou have to say.
Yep.
Come to me when you wantthe adult decisions made.
So, it sounds like therole is problematic.
That's what I'm positingthis late in the podcast.
The role is problematic andit's probably the people yeah.
Yeah.
It's, that's just anindividual problem.
You're absolutely right.
It has nothing to do withthe, the whole system.
(38:56):
You know why I lovesystemic issues, I'll save
this one for the last.
You know what I love morethan a good systemic issue?
A good industrial complex.
That perpetuates flowing money.
And wants to keepthe status quo.
That's right.
Y'all we're talking about USgovernment today on the podcast.
No, no we're not.
Just kidding.
(39:16):
Who said that?
Just kidding.
So massive ecosystem inproduct management, they
got Maven courses for sale.
You got Reforge, you havethat, that, that kind of thing.
Yeah.
Big money, big names.
You got books you can buy, yougot conferences you can go to.
You got a multi, whatI would assume is a
multi-billion dollar industry.
I don't really know thesize of the industry here,
(39:38):
but I would guess thatit's multi-billion dollars.
And I would guess that it islike if LinkedIn or one of
these social media companiesever decided they just wanted
to take a shot at productmanagement like LinkedIn
just started showing likeridiculous like God, what,
what was the one they like?
Quiet quiet fracking, quitting,quiet fracking or whatever.
I, sorry.
No, it was like quiet, quiet.
Cracking.
That was what it was.
(39:58):
White cracking.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I was like, what is this?
Why is this like afeature, a featurette?
So I was like, so they canjust pick any feature that
they want and just go grab thevideos that are available and
throw 'em into the gallery.
Because people aretalking about a trend.
So basically they pickwhatever trend is trending.
No matter how it got trending,they fan it is what they do.
Oh, and then fan it, right?
Yeah.
Well, how do I know they'renot just creating the trend?
(40:19):
Well, they are inmany cases they are.
Okay.
So what if LinkedIn justdecided one day that they
wanted to run a hashtag of like,product management is dumb.
Like, or Agile is dead.
Yeah.
Just like a whole bunchof galleries of people
being like, no, no.
Product management'sa ridiculous job.
You know, like those peoplecan't get anything done
because they put so many rolestogether and it's, it's dead.
Nobody hires productmanagers anymore.
(40:40):
Product engineersis a new thing.
Yeah.
This is not out of the,out of the ordinary at all.
I mean this, I'm prettyconvinced that this happens
all the time and you'll see it.
You'll see when you seeone of these things,
you'll kind of, yeah.
It, it will tingle your right,your psyche, and then suddenly
you see people piling on it.
Yeah.
As soon as a few people pileon one side, a few people,
(41:00):
a few more perhaps pileon the other side, and you
get this arms race going.
Now if we're really smartabout this, we can recognize
that, but there's nota whole lot you can do.
Yeah.
Right.
Because LinkedIn, youcorrectly identified LinkedIn
just a, few moments ago asa social media platform.
It used to be a professionalnetworking connection site
(41:21):
that stopped some time ago.
Now they'rebasically a Facebook.
The product ecosystem whichI would argue like a podcast,
blogs, like that's the realbooks, you know what I mean?
The ecosystem.
So theoretically itshould support a standard
level of training.
Like go read the Marty Caganbooks to start there's a few
creators that are actuallypretty good go follow them.
(41:41):
Mm-hmm.
And theoretically, communityshould provide peer support,
although I would argue likethe pro, I don't know how
much peer support the productcommunity actually like, does.
There's a lot of people inthe product community that are
like charging for their wares.
This is a nice thing about theagile community there, there was
much more of a spirit of like.
I'm gonna create a Miro templateor something just give it out
(42:01):
for free and everyone can use itand dog pile on it and prove it.
And like the, our product,product community doesn't,
they don't really do that asmuch in my opinion, probably
'cause they're working 60 hourdays and doing everything.
Oh, yeah, that makes sense.
I mean it's, it's an industrythat profits off of complexity.
Ambigu.
Complexity and I don't knowif the industry really solves
the, any of those problems.
(42:23):
No.
And, and as you know, andif you've been watching our
podcasts, which you shouldbe I lean very, very firmly
towards this you know, theapprentice model, right?
So the industry shouldhave that, and it's context
specific if you're indefense or healthcare
or biotech or whatever.
If you're there, you shouldbe able to call on somebody,
a, a community there ofproduct folks that can
(42:43):
take you under their wing.
And when I say that, whatdoes that actually look like?
Well, maybe they canshadow you for a bit.
They're not compensated sure.
Who come up with NDAs orwhatever else non-disclosure
agreements Yeah.
Or whatever.
That's fine, but atleast they can see how
something's being done.
Now, if you are one of thosepeople who is an apprentice
here, if you get the opportunityto shadow three or four people,
(43:05):
you're gonna now see threeor four people doing things.
Obviously in different ways.
But you're learning how it'sbeing done in real life.
That's your apprenticeship,that's your quote
unquote internship.
You're not being paid,but you're learning.
Right.
Right.
That is missing andit's also missing in the
agile industry as well.
Mm-hmm.
So I know several people thatare, that are now trying to
(43:25):
reinvent themselves, secondcareer folks, et cetera.
Right.
And I don't have an answer.
Yeah.
I mean the role definitelyneeds to be fixed.
I mean, the, that's also theissue when I see someone come up
with a new framework, or even inthe Agile stuff about like the
no estimates or no backlogs orwhatever other new things people
come out with to try to like.
You know, they're going to atalk, so they gotta develop
something that is likerevolutionary or whatever.
(43:47):
Like they, they're the PMis the same way, but people
are like, oh, here's a newstrategy template, or here's
a new way to do your backlog,or a new tool how many times
we need to reinvent Jira.
I realize I said Jira,I had to get it outta my
mouth there real quick.
Every time they do thatit's under the guise of like
helping solve a problem.
Every time they do that, I feelthat every framework created
(44:09):
brings another complexityinto the field and also
potentially brings another.
Responsibility that nowyou also have to take
ownership of that as well.
Like if, someone came outwith a framework for PMs
to market their thing.
Like here's a twoby two marketing
framework or something.
Now we don't need marketers'cause the PMs do that as well.
Now here's AI prototyping tools.
(44:30):
Now we don't needdesigners or developers.
Ridiculous.
We'll let the PMs do that.
Yeah.
You know, 'cause again, like wedon't know what they do all day.
They do everything.
So you don't know what they do.
Right.
So you assume they do nothing.
Yeah.
In a nutshell, that'sbasically what Agile coach
is, or Scrum Masters.
I mean.
Yeah.
I agree with you.
There, there is no, there isno United sort of like, what is
(44:52):
product management all about?
Or what should it be all about?
And then a concerted effort tonurture folks into the field.
Right.
I would say there's eventhe funny thing about this
is there's even the last.
I'm not even calling for acentralized body of knowledge
or authority or whatever.
Even Agile has more structure,like as a community and like
what are our principles?
(45:12):
What do we believe inkind of stuff Like product
management has none, nothing.
It's literally whatever.
Anybody with the loudest,sexiest voice with the,
the trend that LinkedIndecides to promote this
week, like that, that'swhat product management is.
It's what we're saying reallyis to, there's no principles.
That's what I'm to,to be successful.
You just basically needto write down whatever the
(45:33):
heck it is that you wantother people to believe
and say, this is it folks.
Right?
Yeah.
And unfortunately there'stoo many of them out there
and, and when you look deeperinto what they're saying.
Some of it may float.
Right.
Most of it doesn't . yeah.
So that's the problem.
Yeah.
let's move to a summary herebecause I'm a little depressed.
(45:54):
I have to admit, afterthis podcast, so I don't
know what we can do to fixa PM industrial complex.
That would be a, that wouldbe a nice takeaway here.
Like if before you're gonnaspend money on a, on a
prototyping tool, or if you'regonna spend money ask yourself
like, does it, does it helpme do less things better?
Or is this adding moreresponsibilities that I have
to do now before you decideto spend all your monopoly
(46:17):
money on AI tools to helpyou prototype because you're
designers too slow or whatever.
How about you fix the.
The real issue there, you know?
Yeah, absolutelyagree with that.
Yeah.
I dunno.
On the 10 ladder rung of baselevel and then at the top of the
pyramid that the pyramid schemepyramid that we're climbing.
Like what, what, whatrung are we on now with
the industrial complex?
Oh, I think we're stillin a solid two or three.
(46:38):
Okay.
We haven't even, haven'teven made any progress.
Alright, well, anyway.
Product management, it isn't ajob, it's a socially acceptable
form of workplace masochism.
Sorry.
I was gonna say exploitation.
That was what I meant, butfor some reason in my brain
wouldn't let me let me tryanother one out on you.
Lemme try another one out on.
Let's go with the second one.
(46:59):
Pro product management.
It's we need an entireindustrial complex to teach all
of our executives and businesspeople around the world that
no two product managers are thesame, and their responsibilities
are not the same at any company.
And that the, the job itself asa role is totally not broken.
It's all fine.
So I don't know why I'mpitching you on these, but
I I, I am enjoying pitchingon these, these studies.
(47:19):
These are great.
It isn't, it isn't a job.
It's a role that takesthe skill of at least five
different people while onlypaying you for, for one.
Yeah.
What's there tonot agree on here?
Right?
I agree with all of those.
Listen, all of those things.
I mean, I enjoyproduct management.
I do have to say even afterall this but when you step
back and look at it it is apretty insane career path.
(47:42):
I'd say it is pretty insane.
Maybe product managersshould, take up like
doing magic or something.
Oh, I didn't know whereyou get flaming chainsaws.
Like what?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Tossing, tossing flame or tryingto catch flaming chainsaws.
You know, the funny thingis like, any product
manager listen to this.
Like, they're gonna belike, yeah, I know exactly
what you're talking about.
Nobody's gonna listen to this.
It's gonna be like, no,you guys aren't being
(48:03):
completely unreasonable.
I am the CEO of the product.
I've never worked at aplace where I didn't have,
and I don't work 60 hours.
I'd like to hear from the PMsthat are like, wow, I've got
equity at every company ever.
Or Why would you ever go to acompany and not have equity?
You know, maybe that's,maybe that's the
response we're gonna get.
Like the again, my challengethat I said earlier in the
podcast start writing downwhat you're doing, even one
(48:23):
day of your PM stuff andfigure out, hey, is this
stuff really getting meahead in product management?
Is it getting the product ahead?
With the customers.
Yeah.
You know, is it advancingor is it just like busy work
that really, you should justhave more people and you
know, what would you say?
Find out?
No.
Yeah.
Well that's, that's,that's true too.
I mean you say no to thepeople you can say no to.
(48:43):
Like, of course.
Yeah.
That would be, that'dbe the challenge there.
Indeed.
Anyway, like that wasthe podcast for today.
I like product management.
It's my job.
I quite enjoy it, butsometimes I'm like,
this job is ridiculous.
I think a lot ofpeople say that.
You know their own jobs thatare not in product management,
but pretty much everybodycould say that about their job.
That is in product management.
If you agree or disagree, let usknow in the comments down below,
(49:06):
and don't forget, to subscribeand we will see you next time.
what if I told you that there'sa job where you can be expected
(00:02):
to be the CEO without equity,the therapist, without training
and the engineer withoutcoding time or skills and
the strategist, but withoutauthority, all while working
60 hours a week minimum.
Cool.
Sign me up.
Well, that job isproduct management.
Andy Dufrane gothis rock hammer.
that job is product management.
(00:23):
And it's a job description,like it was generated by AI
that was exclusively trainedon motivational posters.
I that it wasn't very good.
I do have to say I wrotedown like, I have a
dozen, and I was like, no.
Oh, these all suck.
Oh my God.
Let me treat you tosome of the other ones
that also are terrible.
Product management.
The job description where itlooks like someone threw a
bunch of MBA textbooks intoa blender and hit puree.
(00:44):
Nice.
I like that.
Is that one betteror worse than that?
That sounds better.
A lot of people aredrinking that Kool-Aid.
So...
product management it wasa job description that was
written by someone who theironly work experience was
playing the Sims on easymode in the late nineties.
Ooh, I like that one.
That was a good one.
That's one.
Much better.
So today we're asking ifthe product manager role is
(01:06):
fundamentally broken or if youneed a strong generalist that
has a lot of experience in alot of different areas and also
is willing to work 60 hours.
I think the fad is everyonehas to be a specialist.
We need a generalist that'ssolidly grounded with their
experience and it keeps goingback and forth, I guess.
I'm your host productmanager, Brian Orlando.
(01:26):
This is, this is yourco-host your co-host.
My co-hosts everyone's co-host.
This is everyone's co-hostenterprise Business
Agility Consultant.
And the original Sultanof Swing.
Ooh, Mr. Om Patel.
No Swing.
We're the Sultan.
Oh, the consultants.
Oh, are we?
Oh, no, I'm gonna s Is thatthe rest of the podcast?
We're just goingthrough the lyrics.
Not gonna sing it.
This is, that would'vebeen a funnier intro than
(01:47):
what I did as the intro ifyou overlay music on that.
Yeah.
Just to weave the sultans ofswing into the whole intro.
Welcome back to Arguing Agile.
Remember like, and subscribe.
If you like this podcast oryou think you get something
out of it like, and subscribe.
Let's talk about theimpossible job description
of product management.
Neil Mc, Elroy Modern.
PM Neil Mc Elroy.
Modern PMs are expected tomaster business strategy,
technical architecture, designthinking, systems thinking,
(02:08):
design thinking, right?
Yeah.
Data analysis, stakeholdermanagement and communication.
Be sales people.
Go out and visit everysingle one of your customers
in the first whateverwhatever the advice is.
Working 60 hours a weekinvolved in strategy, p and
l, financials, marketing.
That's the job description.
You can't do all of those thingsin 60 hours to begin with, but
(02:29):
also you're assuming one personhas the wherewithal to actually
get their head around all that.
I was gonna say, you'relike, well, you can't, one
person can't do all that in60 hours in a, in a week.
And what I, what I heardin my head was, one person
can't do all that period.
Like Yeah.
Well that's true too.
Those jobs, some of thosejobs are gonna get dropped.
This is you productmanagers out there.
If you hear Brian, you'rejust not communicating enough.
(02:51):
What's going on?
I'm like, oh really?
I'm not like into my office sitdown, sit in the kid's chair.
No, not the adult chair.
Like sit down.
Oh, what do you mean?
You mean while I'm doing salesor while I'm doing technical
design and architecture?
Or while I'm doingbusiness strategy.
Because those are alldifferent audiences right
there, and the sales teammay not care about like.
We have to have this planto leave some technical debt
(03:11):
on the table versus knockingoff some technical debt.
And we need to go a littledeeper in the architecture,
talk about where we'regonna be a year from now.
And sales is gonna say, what,what do you care about that?
Right.
I'll say, Hey,it's, that's my job.
I'm the CEO of the product.
The product.
Yeah.
All of this is gonna bemy, my responsibility when
it comes quarter four.
And you're tryingto push that sale.
And anyone will say like,well, Brian, it's kind of
(03:33):
a ridiculous point you'rethrowing out right now.
You can just push itoff and do it later.
Yeah.
Prepare it later.
Sure.
So now, now you're tellingme how to do my priority.
Like, this is where theproduct management, like
this is where you lose.
It's like there's always gonnabe somebody in the business.
Because you're, you mightbe the CEO of the product.
Right.
I'm gonna keep sayingthat flagrantly, because
I, I enjoy saying that.
'cause I, nobody, nobodywith real experience believes
(03:56):
you're the CEO of the product.
Yeah.
Because of what I'm talkingabout is like, well, if I make
a decision and it de optimizessales, now the VP of sales is
gonna scream at me and thenmake me change my decision.
And then if I change thedecision, now the VP or CTO
is gonna come down and belike, this is ridiculous.
You know, again, then they'regoing to yell at me for,
and now quote Brian doesn'tcommunicate well enough.
That's what, that's, that'sthe way it's gonna manifest.
(04:18):
The person who comes downon you, the first is gonna
start the chain, right?
Yeah.
So you're gonna start spendingmore time communicating if
that's what you're accusedof not doing enough.
But then very quickly CTO inthis example will come back
and say, architecture's a mess.
They can't continueto do it this way.
We're gonna drown intd. All of this stuff.
(04:39):
Should you really even be askedto do all of those things on
top of trying to strategizethe path forward with your
product that you're the CEO of?
Or should you be able tooffload some of that work?
Maybe not communicatingto the customer, because
that should be your job.
One that's like, that shouldbe you leading that, but
maybe the technical stuff youcould offload to someone else.
(04:59):
the point that I canhear clearly now, someone
screaming at their tv Iwas gonna say screaming at
their tv, like their grandmain the eighties over here.
Like, ah, turn the tv.
Don't be throwingthe remote at the tv.
Oh man, the clicker sorry.
The arguing point will bewell, Om, that's ridiculous.
Like no one said you had todo all those things like, you,
you but, but it's your job tofacilitate All those things.
(05:22):
So now , you don't really havecontrol of any of the work.
You're just hoping that yourepeat the message enough
where people get sick ofhearing you and then, they
help you do it or whatever.
That's certainly true ina situation where you have
absolutely no authorityover these peers of yours.
Yeah.
You're trying to influencethem the best you can, but
you really can't controlwhat they do 'cause they
(05:42):
have other priorities.
You know what helps with that?
Controlling thefinances, that helps.
It helps a lot.
That certainly helps when youcome to the end of the year and
you're like, I give engineeringthis much money for this much
staff, or whatever, or I paymarketing this much to promote
by products, and then you'renear the end of the year and
you're like, you know what?
I see a downturn in marketingquality or engagement online
or whatever numbers that youare using the measuring, and
(06:03):
you say, look, guys I am realconcerned about the quality
I'm getting for the moneyI'm putting this department.
Because again, I assume theplace that like you work it
at, or I assume the place thatyou work at is a PM where you
don't control the finances.
There is some, like silois going on that is a
lot of places like that.
Right.
So yeah, I agree.
And there are those placeswhere you are not funded
(06:24):
adequately to begin withon some of those things.
And consequently, youdon't come through with you
don't meet expectations.
Yeah.
So your reward is they'regonna cut funding even more.
Yeah.
Well, on, on my other sideof the PM role obviously is
like impossibly overloaded.
And another point is ifyou're holding out for someone
with all these s skills,abilities, unicorn experiences.
(06:48):
Yeah.
You're basically holdingout for a unicorn.
Yeah.
So it's like you got your jobrole open or 700 applications in
24 hours and none of them fit?
I'm just wondering what,the typical product manager
on the market, like howmany years experience five.
Yeah, I was gonna guess at that.
Yeah.
Three to five years.
Three to five ismid-level they're saying.
I guess nobody could havethe statistic, but I, I'm
(07:10):
just wondering how manyproduct managers out there.
Oh, if anybody wouldhave statistics, it
would be McKinsey.
So this cpo club.com.
It's, it's citinga McKinsey study.
They did, but theydid it in 2014.
Well, no, this says pragmaticMarketing Inc. 2016 study
of almost 10 years ago.
Yeah.
It's, it's, it'slike nine years ago.
(07:30):
I mean, it is not great, but.
26% of product managers polledhad three to five work years
followed by 24% with six to 10.
Click on that link.
It says the rest,the report here.
Oh, oh, oh.
Let's see if, if it even opens.
Oh, there we are.
P, DF.
So this, are you seeingthis crap or, oh, sorry.
I dunno.
That's not cool.
(07:51):
I'm sure this study is great.
That's it.
That's the one.
So that's the one.
I don't know if you can,you can zoom that up.
I can zoom this alittle bit there.
Scroll it.
So people with under threeyears experience only represent.
19% of the respondents inthis study, and then nearly
everybody else is in themiddle of the distribution
between three to five years.
(08:11):
26%, six to 10 years, 24%.
And then over 10 yearsis a lot actually.
31%.
I didn't expect that much.
But also as you know, on thepodcast, this is 2016, and
these people are claiming tohave 15 plus years experience
in product managers.
They're claiming they wereproduct managers in 1999.
(08:32):
So I'm gonna say,let me see your data.
Yeah.
And fun.
Like, here's your ticket.
Like you've been pulledover by the fun police.
That's what I'msaying right now.
I don't believe it.
Well, listen, in the nine, nineyears since there's been an
awful lot of product managementcertifications been handed out,
so you don't know now, right?
How many product managersthat are out there.
(08:52):
They need to do anotherstudies I think an updated
version of it, but possiblywith fewer graphics.
I wanted to get some numbershere because I was gonna say,
you're looking for this unicornand if they even exist is beside
the point if they even exist,.
You're passing over likethat can do the job because
you have this unrealisticexpectation in your head because
(09:13):
you know, all the, these HBRarticles and Forbes articles
tell you that the CEO of theproduct should be able to
do everything, that's right.
Master with, with 25years of experience.
Yes.
Yes.
25 years experience in ai.
Because machine learningis not cool enough yeah.
Ai it's like machinelearning without the math.
Like there's a, I got, sorry.
(09:35):
There's a lot of like goodquips I could throw in here.
One thing that I didn't givecredence because again, I
hate the term CEO of theproduct is like the concept
being expressed is you havethe ownership like a CEO.
You take ownership of everythingthat you're involved with.
That's somebody arguingfor would point out to be
like, well, because the jobgets overloaded is because
(09:56):
we end up taking ownershipof all these things.
So you need to be a bettercommunicator and let people
know you're overloadedor get sidekicks as a
CO has, you're right.
Yeah.
Or hire people.
Except you're back towhere I was say yes.
Oh, you could hire peopleif only you had the budget.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
So I don't know this one.
(10:17):
On a scale of one to how,how many balls a circus
clown can juggle at onetime before dropping
them about four or five.
When they're not on fire?
No, no, they're all on fire.
Oh, well then maybe one.
Yeah.
So impressive to watch, butsomeone's gonna get hurt.
That's what I takefrom that category.
Speaking of gettinghurt, let's talk about
the 60 hour work week.
Even Marty Cagan Oh yeah.
(10:37):
He has a great quote in oneof his books that says, he's
not saying that you have towork 60 hours to be a good
product manager, but he issaying he's never met anybody
that he considered a greatproduct manager that worked
any less than 60 hours.
So in other words,you can work less.
If you wanna be a not so greatproduct manager, listen, you
can take weekends if you want.
(10:58):
If you want to be aloser, how dare you.
I took weekends last week yeah.
What the heck?
You want another weekend Om?
This is gonna exactlythis, this is gonna turn
to a trend at some point.
Next thing I have, thatnext thing you're gonna
ask for days off whenyou're having your baby,
you just gotta hustle.
Om.
You gotta hustle that.
That's my, I'm gonna, I'mgonna, I'm coming out the gate.
(11:21):
I'm coming out swinging true.
With this, against thishustle culture nonsense.
So if you're saying that like,no, Brian, one person must do
all these things, they mustfacilitate all these things.
I'm gonna say, well, one personcan't do all this, so you're
gonna get help for that person.
No, you're not gonna gethelp for that person.
I've never seen a productmanager, like an individual
(11:43):
contributor, productmanager with a staff
like a product operationspopped up for a second.
Same thing with uh, ux uh,researchers , right, they
extend the capabilities ofthe, of the UX person, because
in a good organization likeUX can't be a shared service
like ux, each team needs theirown UX person because they're
doing a lot of the offloadingof going out and, and talking
(12:05):
to customers and arrangingsessions and, and those
sessions need to be preppedwhen you talk to customers.
Who's gonna do that?
Well, the product manager'sgonna do it, right?
They can also be thegraphic designer 'cause.
Why not?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, in small companiesthey do, you know?
Mm-hmm.
They're doing Figma mockups andnow people online are clamoring
to just give them more AItools look under my jacket.
I happen to have an AI toolyou can buy, and you don't need
(12:27):
to hire a legitimate designerfor $150,000 or whatever.
My tool you can buy for $50,000.
And if you don't get theright solution the first
time, just keep tryingactually in an unlimited
amount of dollars because youjust spend tokens forever.
Right, right.
Yeah.
Sorry.
YouTube's really gonnapull that too, too.
(12:49):
Yeah, sorry.
YouTube they're the superpredators of 2025 AI companies.
That's what we're saying.
Where all the hitsof the eighties are
coming back in 2025.
Oh man.
This is becominga sassier podcast.
The issue here is MartyCagan's saying it.
Everyone's gonna listenand at least consider it.
When someone like Marty Cagansays it the executives will read
that in a book when they finallyget around to like, well, you
(13:10):
should read, inspire to know howproducts are supposed to work,
and they'll give it a shot.
And they'll read that andthey'll be like, oh, see here
it says they gotta work 60hours minimum to be successful.
That kind of stuffthat, it gives an
expectation that spreads.
And in and of itself sayingsomeone's gotta work more to be
more effective in this mainlycommunication based role.
(13:32):
I don't even necessarilyhave a problem with that.
My issue is like, I don'thave a problem with that.
But I'm at a point in my careerwhere like all those years of
like being in the office untilnine, 10 o'clock at night trying
to get a release together.
Mm-hmm.
You know, getting outearly with the customer and
ear, early mornings, latenights, that kind of stuff.
Entertaining all like,I, I've done all that.
(13:54):
I have the benefit.
All that's in thepast of my career.
And now I'm in the phaseof my life where I've
prioritized you know, familyand other things like that.
Yeah.
Now better got olderparents, stuff like that.
Like I, there's no way Icould have done what I'm
doing now in my personallife and all of that stuff.
So basically what you're sayingis don't have a personal life.
When I hear 60minimum, by the way.
(14:16):
Exactly.
That's what I hear.
I hear.
Don't have kids.
Like, you don't, don't moveyour relationships forward.
Don't be there for yourparents or whatever.
I think it's just this wholemysticism about having the work,
these endless hours, burningthe candle at both ends, burning
all your candles in a day.
It's ridiculous, right?
Yeah.
I mean, there's evidence, Iguess behind the other point
on here that Europeans don'tdo that, and yet they churn
(14:39):
out pretty good products.
So why us?
It's maybe just a local.
US based, right?
Or America is based.
Culturalism there around productmanagement that you have to keep
your nose to the grindstone.
Until the grindstone wears out.
It's ridiculous . thegrindstones gonna wear out.
Sure, sure.
It is.
(15:00):
You keep doing that kid.
Yeah.
Right.
Really what happens is it likethe cycle leads to burnout.
Burnout leads to turnover,and then rinse and repeat.
You know, we'll get anotherwhipper snapper in here.
Fresh.
Fresh.
I remember somebody once toldme , Brian, you need, you're
bringing in these candidates.
I need you to bringon someone fresh.
I was like, what does that mean?
I was like, are you telling meto not interview older workers?
(15:20):
Is that what you're telling me?
And they're like, oh, no, Iwould never say that, Brian.
But we need people with freshideas and people that are,
they're ready to jump in.
I remember this conversationlike it was yesterday.
It was a long time ago.
And I remember just like,not even skipping a beat,
, so you're telling me notto hire older people, is
what you're telling me?
No.
Yeah.
(15:41):
So the funny thing is, Iguess not really even funny.
That definitely not funny.
You could probably have thatsame conversation in several
companies today, right?
Bring somebody fresh in,bring in a new person
who has fresh ideas.
Like people with 3, 5, 10years of 15 years of experience
can't come up with fresh ideas.
Yeah.
How do you believe that?
(16:01):
It doesn't shock me becauseyour culture's a grindhouse
and if you don't changeanything, you're you're always
gonna do the same thing.
Bring in people, burn 'emout grind 'em down, burn 'em
out ship 'em out, get newpeople in, rinse and repeat.
Yeah.
That's not thenew ideas culture.
No, no, it's not.
The irony of that culturethough, is they think
they want to inspireinnovation by bringing
(16:22):
in new, new blood, right?
Yeah.
But actually what happensin reality is the opposite.
They're not innovating becausethey're burning people out.
These people getjaded pretty quickly.
You get someone else in,just give 'em some time and
then just keep doing that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then you turn around andthen you're that windsurf guy
that like was the engineer thatstarted there, and then Yeah.
(16:43):
He got nothing.
They're over here on, on socialmedia being like, oh no, all
of our people got compensated.
And he, and he'slike, he's like, whoa.
Oh, it's my stapler.
Like that was.
Yeah, we should go findthat video so we could
watch it where he is.
Like somebody had to trackhim down and interview him.
I, I don't, I don't know.
Anyway, track your working hoursand, and also like consider
(17:03):
when you have conversationsabout like something that
stress you out at work forthe day or when you're driving
or in the shower I do thisa lot when I am either about
to go to bed or when I firstwake up my brain rearranges
itself when I'm sleeping.
I solve architecturalproblems, when I'm either
laying down to bed, orwhen I wake up immediately
(17:24):
because when I wake up I cansolve issues in 20 minutes.
That I beat my headagainst for two hours.
Arrested.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That, that kind of stuff islike, oh, you're thinking
about a work problem and you'rethinking about what you wanna
do first when you get behindyour keyboard when you get down
with your daily community right?
Yeah.
Keep a little notepad with youat all times, like by the bed.
Keep it with you in your desk.
Keep it with you in your car.
(17:45):
And just jot down all thosetimes that you're working
on little tasks like that.
And then consider them work.
If you're a millennial,you could just say,
Siri, take a note.
Yeah, true.
You know, just write downall those times and then
consider them work, becauseI think you're gonna be
shocked that you're gonnaget to 60 hours pretty fast.
Keep track of all thatbecause you're gonna be,
you're gonna be shocked howfast you get to 60 hours.
What is, when someone'slike, you gotta work 60
(18:06):
hours, what does that mean?
You know, that, that,that's, that's another
side of like, long hoursare just table stakes.
The argument that I'm makingnow is these high impact roles.
Require high commitment, whenI was on contract you were
working with founders andfounders are willing to work
an unlimited amount of hoursI'm sure they were willing to
work all day long 'cause theyknew they were gonna just,
there something in it for them.
They were gonna cash outat the end of that rainbow.
(18:27):
They were gonna ca at theend of that train tunnel.
You know, their lightwas a pile of money.
Whereas this engineerover here, I should go
find 'em 'cause they'retalking about him so much.
Oh, I wish I could,oh my poor guy.
Anyway, that's whatthey're gonna claim.
And the founder in order totake you more seriously, you
gotta, when they're thereand when they're showing up,
you gotta be there with 'em.
I worked for a guy, he showedup the office, 6:00 AM.
(18:50):
He's like, there'sno way I can do work.
At home.
'cause my my family wouldlike see me up and wanna
talk to me and stuff.
And he was like divinginto like financial
numbers and statistics.
Right.
And he'd had to buildreports and stuff like that.
And he'd get in the officeat 6:00 AM and he'd have
productive just like the, justlike I do with development.
I started at like 6 (19:07):
45 AM and then between 6:45 AM
and 9 45, I have three hourswhere nobody talks to me.
That's all fine.
Except you shouldn't be doingthat at 6:45 PM also, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Look, just understandthat you have a life.
Everyone only has 24 hoursin their day, so you've
just gotta make the mostof your day in some form.
(19:30):
Right.
Work.
So what was that phraseI'm trying to remember.
Somebody said, do you work tolive or do you live to work?
Everyone has to answerthat for themselves.
Yeah, well hey, while you'reworking all those hours Mr. CEO
of the product you know, let's,let's talk about that fantasy.
(19:50):
Well, while you'regrinding, let's talk about
this pm as CEO metaphor.
it's been popular since BenHorowitz's 2012 blog post.
Let's go.
Let's go see ifwe can find that.
It says good product managers.
Let's see.
It's the Andreen Horowitz.
Horowitz.
Ben Har Horowitz.
(20:10):
Yeah.
So the metaphor, CEO, ofthe product, I guess it
originally came from thisarticle written in 2012.
Good product managersknow the market.
Let's see, let's read here.
Let's see.
A good product manageris a CEO of the product.
Oh, okay.
There it is right there.
Its the second sentence.
A good product manager takesfull responsibility and
measures themselves in termsof success of the product.
They're responsible forthe right, product, right
(20:31):
time and all that entails.
Bad product managershave a lot of excuses.
Not enough funding.
Engineering manager's an idiot.
Microsoft has 10 times asmany engineers working on it.
I'm overworked.
I don't get enough direction.
The CEO of the product,don't worry about how
much funding I give you.
Oh, you're the COof the product.
Why don't you suck it up?
It's funny that he prefacethe whole article by saying
(20:52):
it was written 15 years ago.
It's not relevant anymore.
that's ridiculous.
I think this whole thingcontradicts everything
else underneath it.
Probably.
Product managers createleverageable, collateral.
FAQs, presentation.
White papers, bad productmanagers complain.
They spend all day answeringquestions for sales.
Good product managers anticipatethe serious product flaws
and build real solutions.
(21:12):
Bad product managersput out fires all day.
There's a lot in thisthat I have an issue with.
Yeah.
Is that the wholearticle is good.
Good product managers do this.
Bad product managers do that.
I think that that'show it's formatted.
But there might be morebeyond the ad as surface.
No.
Oh, that's, no, that's it.
That's it.
Oh, okay.
I thought there was more.
(21:33):
Okay.
Well, if that's thecase, this may be about
a dozen things here.
Yeah.
That he decrees.
Good managers do andbad managers don't.
Good product managers sendtheir status reports on
time every week becausethey're disciplined.
Bad product managers forgetto send their status reports.
Why?
We send the statusreports Exactly.
In 2012, that's what they did.
I was over here talking tocustomers and selling yachts.
(21:54):
I mean, I'm just saying likeyou had budgets for yachts.
anyway, like, listen, youneed to just take ownership,
kid., Stop crying that youwant nights and weekends off.
Get back in there.
The point of what hesaid was CEOs take
responsibility of everything.
, Bold.
Statement.
, Bold claim in the modern erathat CEOs take responsibility.
Especially in light of,given that you don't
have everything you need.
You don't have the budget,you don't have the time and
(22:16):
the day to do everything,but you take responsibility.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But it, I mean, again, isn'the making my point for me of
like, good product managersjust figure out a way to do it.
We had the ExtremeOwnership podcast.
With a lot of this, wehashed that in that.
So like, I dunno how great ofa category this is, because
I could take product managerout of this and put any
other job position in hereand say oh, you're a good
(22:38):
product marketing manager.
Don't complain thatthe code is bad.
Get in there in a repoand start fixing things it
sounds ridiculous, right?
Yeah.
Because it is.
'cause it is ridiculous.
Thinking like a CEOencourages strategic, business
oriented decision making.
Articles like this framethe role as prestigious Hey,
you're the CEO of the product.
You're the main personthat decides everything.
(22:59):
Get in there kid.
You got the fame, you gotthe money, oh, you don't
have either one of those.
You also don'thave any authority.
So PMs have responsibilitywithout authority.
That's the bottom linefrom all of this stuff.
Yeah.
Yes.
That's the delusion here.
It's like you're notthe CEO of the product.
And that's, even he walksback that whole article and
says like, you know what?
This isn't reallyrelevant for modern PMs.
(23:21):
And he walks thewhole thing back.
And I would have to say heprobably got sick of getting
challenged with this oneis like, well, you have
no authority over anyone.
Right.
And the CEO can justdecide like, you know what?
I'm gonna take out a loanand move all my development
offshore and do whateverand not you and fire all
my engineers if they have aproblem consistently enough.
Sure.
And they will Absolutely.
That, that CEO hasauthority, right.
(23:44):
You're lucky to have influence.
Yes.
Yeah.
Your CE might come inand tell you what your
roadmap's gonna be.
Exactly.
And I would say that'sapplicable, more applicable
to most PMs than telling them,Hey, quit crying about how much
money you get from the business.
Don't worry about it.
Why you worry about that?
Right.
Just do the best you can.
Yeah.
Focus on that.
Showcase somethingsuccessful first and then
they might listen to you.
We're not gonna hire aQA department or customer
(24:04):
service department, or, ormore than one developer.
Yeah.
Go fix quality yourself.
Yeah.
You have total controlover what you put out.
Yeah.
Also get that thing donetoday, by the end of the day.
By the way, kid, I'm laughing'cause it's just so ridiculous.
Yeah.
Calling yourself a CEOof the product and you
can't even expense.
$500. A 500 tool.
Yeah.
(24:24):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Exactly.
You can't approve a, a cloudcode subscription or a Cloud max
subscription or whatever, right?
Yeah.
What, 200 bucks amonth whatever it is.
I don't remember what it was.
Yeah.
So, but you know what I cansee being attracted to this
is people that are ego-driventhat or just plain naive.
I mean, the ego-drivenfolks they could live in an
environment like this wherethey just blame everyone else.
(24:46):
Of course.
Yes.
You know?
Yeah.
I mean, they, theoreticallyyou should be taking
ownership, I just don't see itworking, is what I'm saying.
I just don't see it working.
It's tough for me tosee the other side here.
Because this is themost broken thing.
Every role and every companyhas a different mix of what
are you clearly accountablefor as a product manager?
What, what decisionshave been delegated to
(25:08):
you and what decisions.
Rest with the CEO or thedirector or whatever, some
other team or whatever, right.
If you're willing to write thatdown, then I'm willing to have
a real conversation about this.
But if you want the comfortof always being able to move
a goalpost when somethingmakes you uncomfortable.
Because, because again, likethe product manager is the
one that's supposed to be likegetting evidence and making
the evidence based decisions.
(25:29):
And when you run that up thechain and people want the
ability to mess around thedata or throw out certain
things to make certain casesand the, you know what I mean?
Like ego just doesn'twork in this, ego destroys
this whole that's why thiscategory, I, I'm not gonna
get over this category.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I, I'm, I'mwith you on that.
Definitely.
Alright, well I'm gonna setthe reality distortion field
(25:51):
to maximum volume and we'regonna move on to the next
category because this is a,ended up, I thought it was a
good category and the planningand it ended up being a terrible
category and now I'm depressed.
So speaking of the depressed.
Let's explore the human Swissarmy knife phenomenon of
the do do everything person.
That Modern PMshave, have found 'em.
So they're, they'recoding prototypes now
(26:11):
with AI tools, running qa,running customer support.
Doing all of their marketingpotentially themselves.
Working with sales.
Working with thedevelopment team with
architecture and design.
And they're doing featuresand they're and they,
they're one-stop shop.
Basically Jack of all trades.
Jack of all trades.
That's right.
That's cool.
I guess.
(26:31):
How do you, how do youfind people like this?
Well I will tell you it is mucheasier to make people like that.
So there we have hang up.
Number one in this category isnobody wants to train anymore.
So you thought I was gonna say,nobody wants to work anymore.
Didn't you just No, nobody.
No, no.
I knew where you were gonna go.
That's right.
With the training side of it.
Nobody wants to work atthe Salt mine anymore.
(26:52):
Getting your hands dirty.
Om that's what, that'swhat they'll say.
They'll say, Om, you justgotta get in there and
get your hands dirty.
We don't have, we don't havebudget for scrum masters.
We need people that are willingto get their hands dirty.
That's assuming you know whatto do when your hands are dirty.
Yeah, because I mean, some ofthese folks don't necessarily
have the chops to know what todo with their hands in there.
(27:13):
Right.
So what do you,what do you do now?
Like you said, they'renot being trained.
They're not being given budgetto go out and get trained,
but yet they're supposed to bejack of all trades, get your
hands dirty, get somethingturned out pretty quickly.
How do you do that?
How do you find these people?
Well, I'll tell youhow most people do it.
You create chaos and then goodpeople step up and fix it.
(27:34):
And then you take the credit.
That's how I've seenthe bad people succeed
in product management.
The argument here is, if yourteams are cross-functional and
they should be like argumentfor me you will start absorbing
some of that cross-functionalityover time if your teams
truly are cross-functional.
And I think as an organizationyou have to, you have to
have intent to get yourteams up to that level.
(27:57):
If you're not sure how getoutside help, well, if you're
not in control of any budgetand anybody, you have to go
beg somebody for every singlescrappy dollar or whatever,
this is like one of the firstthings that's out the window
you know, and then the otherthing is you have a little
bit of control of your time.
That would be the other thing Ihope is you have a little bit of
control over your time to maybeif they're not training you,
you can put some time aside tolearn some new skills on the job
(28:19):
training, that kind of stuff.
Yeah, I mean, again, likethe benefit of working
at a small company is youget to wear multiple hats.
Every employee gets to wearmultiple hats, but that's
just because a small companycan't hire the right people
to fill the positions.
And Yeah.
You're being asked to domultiple jobs, basically.
But this is doing multiple jobs.
Right, right.
Well, there's a word for that.
We'll get to it in thenext category, I'm sure.
(28:41):
But yeah.
Doing everyone else'sjob, that's not on the job
training that's when you'redoing everyone else's job.
Designing.
We're not gonna hirea UI ux designer.
The product manager's gonna doit all we're not gonna hire a UX
person to help do interviews andsurveys and capture feedback and
to make meaningful interactionsbetween the customers.
We're gonna have the productmanager do that, or the
dev team do that, right?
(29:02):
And they're not gonna getany help from a professional
like that was, yeah.
But what you're really doing islike, the more of the stuff that
I said before, like customersupport and marketing stuff,
and you doing QA and doing allthese AI assisted prototypes
and whatnot but where'sthe actual business like.
PM skills being used.
Where's that?
(29:22):
Is that stuff getting minimized?
Like where's ourbusiness strategy?
How does the producthook into that?
How is the product gonnaadvance the business strategy
over the next two years?
Where's our long term, likeall the stuff that I think of,
like when's the pm Like hittingthe street to help expand their
knowledge of the business.
Alright, let someoneelse do that.
Well, I think someone else,I think someone else wants
(29:44):
someone else to do that.
Exactly.
And they don't wantthe PM to do that.
Yes.
Yeah.
The more of this stuff thatgets thrown on the PM to do the
less actual PMing gets done.
And by PMing what people willbe like, well Brian, that's
a pretty squishy statement.
You need to like quantifythat, but gimme some things
that the PM would do.
I don't know.
How about business strategy?
Who else is gonna do it?
Competitive analysis.
(30:05):
How about, keeping your eye openabout trends in your industry.
Mm-hmm.
You know, going to how longdoes it take to read all your
latest industry publicationsor blogs or follow all
the people that are, atthe edge of your industry.
Like if you're in governmentthat's constantly, PhDs
are constantly puttingout research papers about
things that may be relevantto you and your industry.
You need to be on theedge of that stuff.
(30:25):
'cause you go to a conferenceand stuff, people are gonna
talk about, you're not gonnaknow what they're talking about.
So like, all of that.
Staying ahead.
Normally that time is spenton nights and weekends
and I'm saying considerall that work time now.
Right.
Because it's work time.
It's all work.
I agree.
This stuff like keepingan eye on the regulatory
changes in your industry.
(30:46):
Right.
Yeah.
Because if you're blindsidedby that, well, it doesn't
matter what you're building.
I gotta imagine that likelawyers and stuff are like,
they're keeping an eyeon what cases are going
through the court right now?
You know, especially federal,well, I mean, federal lawyers
or their own brand of lawyer,but yeah, they're probably
constantly keeping an eyeon who made what decision
when, . See where the windsare blowing type of stuff.
(31:07):
This is the same thing, exceptit's not an extra thing you do.
It is a job.
It is the job.
Yeah.
It's a job to make sure thatyou, you're not gonna get
lapped by your competitorsand that the market is not
gonna move on without you.
And if nobody'sflying that plane,
there's only one parachute.
Again, if you're gonna talkabout taking ownership of stuff
and get on that high horse andsaying you need to be taking
(31:28):
ownership, I can't trust that.
Like, because people have arandom VP director title that
they're doing these jobs.
Right.
I want them to bedoing these jobs.
Yeah.
They themselves alsoprobably have 15 things
that they need to be doing.
At a time.
In addition to peoplemanagement, which didn't
even appear on anythingin this list so far.
Right.
Actually managing people.
The takeaway in this categoryis like, start marking down.
(31:53):
Like write down the tasksthat you do during a week.
Right.
Or even in a day.
Like, try it for one day.
Like, write down just alist of like everything that
you do oh, I facilitated adiscussion about this, or I
made a decision about whatever.
You know, really thinkabout what you are doing,
like research a littlebit into this or whatever.
You know really think about likestep back and think about like,
how to explain what you havedone to somebody that doesn't
(32:14):
know anything about technicalor business or whatever.
Explain what you'redoing to a child.
Write it down on the line andthen when the day is over and
you're ready to go to bed.
You'll be able to look backat the list to note every task
that you did and then decide didthis task get me ahead or did
this task get the product ahead?
That's what I'm lookingfor is what are the non PM
(32:35):
tasks that you're doing?
I even, when we released anew version, I did a little QA
test like that gets the productahead because we gotta make
sure it's quality or whatever.
I'm like, that's not reallywhat I'm talking about.
That didn't reallyget the product.
Like, it reallysignificantly launches you
forward into the future.
I don't think so.
And you know this suggestionof making a list of all of the,
not my job things allows youto do something else, right?
(32:58):
It allows you to look back andsay, I did all of those things.
Fine.
Should I have been doing that?
Who really should be doing?
Just add anothercolumn next to it.
Yeah.
And then see if you canleverage that list, because
now you have evidence, right.
With your with your C-levelfolks and say, we need
to get someone 'causeI'm carrying the load.
Right.
And if you're really doingthis right, add yet another
(33:19):
column to its right.
And say, what areyou missing out on?
Because you're doingthese things instead.
Right.
And you might have achance to convince someone
to get you some help.
And also if we're usingextreme ownership as a
weapon, 'cause that's whatI get outta this category.
Surely PMs are compensated likefounders that they're emulating.
Right, right.
Windsurf, sorry, sorry.
(33:41):
Listen, if they were, they mightbe able to justify working a
60 hour week days, hour weeks.
Right?
Because they, they say, well,there's something there for me.
But often they're not, youare basically making someone
rich at the end of the day.
Well, that's, I mean,that's, I like yachts.
That's what I'm saying.
I like looking at themwhile they sail away.
(34:01):
So listen, Om, we weara lot of hats here at
Brian and Ohm's startup.
We sure do.
We wear a lot of hats and we wegot yachts to buy, and there's
no way we're gonna buy 'em ifwe give away some of those hats.
I don't know why wewear so many hats.
Like I can only wear onehat at a time, I guess.
But the experience that you'llget working here is the reward.
I'm gonna pay you in exposure.
(34:22):
Sorry, I can't, these aresupposed to be four points.
Sorry.
I'm sorry everyone.
I'm sorry.
I'm supposed to be arguingon behalf the, the learning.
And the exposure todifferent learning
experiences is invaluable.
Ohm invaluable.
Absolutely.
We can only pay you 35 centsand four peanuts this pay cycle.
Wow.
(34:42):
Times are good.
So this kind of play might workwith some of the junior folks
that are entering the marketwhere you're saying, Hey look,
these are greener pasture comehither, more impressionable.
And as they walk across,they find themselves
sucked into the quicksand.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Experience.
Yes, of course.
Right?
You can't just washthat out and say there's
nothing to be gained there.
(35:03):
There is, however, experiencedoesn't pay your bills.
Oh, no.
Experience doesn't.
I was gonna say experiencedoesn't pay your divorce
costs because, 'cause you'vegotta burn yourself out
trying to get experienceunder the guise of this what
we've been talking about.
So it's not the be alland end all of everything.
So take that for what it is.
Take the experiencefor what it's worth.
(35:25):
But also at the sametime, understand why
you're doing this for you.
Right.
Longer term.
This is the word that Iwas looking for earlier.
I'm gonna drop it in thiscategory because it seems
appropriate in this category.
And that word is exploitation.
This goes back to theexample I said earlier in
the podcast of like, we needsomeone with more energy.
So what you're saying is youwould like to perpetuate the
(35:46):
cycle where we get young peoplein here pay them peanuts.
Give them this job title thathas this illusionary marketing
prestige built onto it.
Have them give usentrepreneurial effort at
entry level employee prices,and then keep doing that model
until we burn those people out.
The people who by the way,could have been utilizing
(36:09):
their entrepreneurial spirit tobuild companies of their own.
Sure.
And some do escape thetrap after a while.
So the unempathetic theunempathetic pushback to
this will be like, well,then they can go do that.
They can go do it.
They, they canquit and go do it.
Ohm, they should have done that.
And then said, you know thatthere's a lot of bad faith.
Pushback in this category.
Yeah, the other thing I thoughtof was that, oh, but nobody
(36:30):
wants the stress of equityand like having to go out and
make the sale to make payroll.
People don't want, they don'twant the ownership equity.
Oh yeah, sure.
It's, well that equitymay pay bills better
than your experience.
The side effect of someof these things, is
people get burned out.
They leave, they go to othercompanies and they try to
(36:53):
apply whatever they gainedfrom their experience, right?
Yeah , so if these arethe younger entry level
people, they probablyhaven't gained a whole lot.
Because at that age bracket,they value personal time,
et cetera, more than justtrying to do everything
for the mothership.
So they're gonna go toanother company and they
(37:13):
will try to apply that thereand good luck there too,
because it's the same culture.
Right.
Then what happens I'lltell you what happens
is you have no equity.
And if you're one of those youngpeople listening to this or
watching this and you think thegrass is greener on the other
side, lemme tell you, grassis greener where you water it.
We're coming to thesame takeaway with a
(37:34):
lot of these categoriesof, don't be a sucker.
You know, that that's what we'recoming to at the end of these.
Like that when, when, when Isaid earlier is like, write
down all the hours thatyou're thinking about work
and like thinking about ormulling over work decisions.
And then considerthose work hours.
When you're thinking aboutMarty Cagan's, like 60 hours,
I'm betting you're probablyworking 60 hours already.
You just don't considerif my butt's not in a
(37:55):
chair, in a cubicle, in anoffice, I'm not working.
Which by the way is, is that'show Jamie Dimon thinks about it.
If you're working from home,you're just playing, you're
playing the role home.
You're just playing at therole, you gotta be in the
office and then play the role.
That's right.
You gotta just sit, in theoffice and play solitaire for,
or get on Zoom calls like youcould have done from home.
(38:16):
That's true.
So the real founders thepeople with the equity they
have the control and withthis shiny title PM like
you have the illusionalcontrol, there are some
things you can do to fix that.
Obviously equity's betterbecause then when someone
running the business talksto you, they're talking
to you like a partner.
Mm-hmm.
'cause you have equity,right , versus talking to you.
(38:36):
Like someone that'son that burnout wheel.
Like, you're onlyhere temporary kid.
I don't care whatyou have to say.
Yep.
Come to me when you wantthe adult decisions made.
So, it sounds like therole is problematic.
That's what I'm positingthis late in the podcast.
The role is problematic andit's probably the people yeah.
Yeah.
It's, that's just anindividual problem.
You're absolutely right.
It has nothing to do withthe, the whole system.
(38:56):
You know why I lovesystemic issues, I'll save
this one for the last.
You know what I love morethan a good systemic issue?
A good industrial complex.
That perpetuates flowing money.
And wants to keepthe status quo.
That's right.
Y'all we're talking about USgovernment today on the podcast.
No, no we're not.
Just kidding.
(39:16):
Who said that?
Just kidding.
So massive ecosystem inproduct management, they
got Maven courses for sale.
You got Reforge, you havethat, that, that kind of thing.
Yeah.
Big money, big names.
You got books you can buy, yougot conferences you can go to.
You got a multi, whatI would assume is a
multi-billion dollar industry.
I don't really know thesize of the industry here,
(39:38):
but I would guess thatit's multi-billion dollars.
And I would guess that it islike if LinkedIn or one of
these social media companiesever decided they just wanted
to take a shot at productmanagement like LinkedIn
just started showing likeridiculous like God, what,
what was the one they like?
Quiet quiet fracking, quitting,quiet fracking or whatever.
I, sorry.
No, it was like quiet, quiet.
Cracking.
That was what it was.
(39:58):
White cracking.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I was like, what is this?
Why is this like afeature, a featurette?
So I was like, so they canjust pick any feature that
they want and just go grab thevideos that are available and
throw 'em into the gallery.
Because people aretalking about a trend.
So basically they pickwhatever trend is trending.
No matter how it got trending,they fan it is what they do.
Oh, and then fan it, right?
Yeah.
Well, how do I know they'renot just creating the trend?
(40:19):
Well, they are inmany cases they are.
Okay.
So what if LinkedIn justdecided one day that they
wanted to run a hashtag of like,product management is dumb.
Like, or Agile is dead.
Yeah.
Just like a whole bunchof galleries of people
being like, no, no.
Product management'sa ridiculous job.
You know, like those peoplecan't get anything done
because they put so many rolestogether and it's, it's dead.
Nobody hires productmanagers anymore.
(40:40):
Product engineersis a new thing.
Yeah.
This is not out of the,out of the ordinary at all.
I mean this, I'm prettyconvinced that this happens
all the time and you'll see it.
You'll see when you seeone of these things,
you'll kind of, yeah.
It, it will tingle your right,your psyche, and then suddenly
you see people piling on it.
Yeah.
As soon as a few people pileon one side, a few people,
(41:00):
a few more perhaps pileon the other side, and you
get this arms race going.
Now if we're really smartabout this, we can recognize
that, but there's nota whole lot you can do.
Yeah.
Right.
Because LinkedIn, youcorrectly identified LinkedIn
just a, few moments ago asa social media platform.
It used to be a professionalnetworking connection site
(41:21):
that stopped some time ago.
Now they'rebasically a Facebook.
The product ecosystem whichI would argue like a podcast,
blogs, like that's the realbooks, you know what I mean?
The ecosystem.
So theoretically itshould support a standard
level of training.
Like go read the Marty Caganbooks to start there's a few
creators that are actuallypretty good go follow them.
(41:41):
Mm-hmm.
And theoretically, communityshould provide peer support,
although I would argue likethe pro, I don't know how
much peer support the productcommunity actually like, does.
There's a lot of people inthe product community that are
like charging for their wares.
This is a nice thing about theagile community there, there was
much more of a spirit of like.
I'm gonna create a Miro templateor something just give it out
(42:01):
for free and everyone can use itand dog pile on it and prove it.
And like the, our product,product community doesn't,
they don't really do that asmuch in my opinion, probably
'cause they're working 60 hourdays and doing everything.
Oh, yeah, that makes sense.
I mean it's, it's an industrythat profits off of complexity.
Ambigu.
Complexity and I don't knowif the industry really solves
the, any of those problems.
(42:23):
No.
And, and as you know, andif you've been watching our
podcasts, which you shouldbe I lean very, very firmly
towards this you know, theapprentice model, right?
So the industry shouldhave that, and it's context
specific if you're indefense or healthcare
or biotech or whatever.
If you're there, you shouldbe able to call on somebody,
a, a community there ofproduct folks that can
(42:43):
take you under their wing.
And when I say that, whatdoes that actually look like?
Well, maybe they canshadow you for a bit.
They're not compensated sure.
Who come up with NDAs orwhatever else non-disclosure
agreements Yeah.
Or whatever.
That's fine, but atleast they can see how
something's being done.
Now, if you are one of thosepeople who is an apprentice
here, if you get the opportunityto shadow three or four people,
(43:05):
you're gonna now see threeor four people doing things.
Obviously in different ways.
But you're learning how it'sbeing done in real life.
That's your apprenticeship,that's your quote
unquote internship.
You're not being paid,but you're learning.
Right.
Right.
That is missing andit's also missing in the
agile industry as well.
Mm-hmm.
So I know several people thatare, that are now trying to
(43:25):
reinvent themselves, secondcareer folks, et cetera.
Right.
And I don't have an answer.
Yeah.
I mean the role definitelyneeds to be fixed.
I mean, the, that's also theissue when I see someone come up
with a new framework, or even inthe Agile stuff about like the
no estimates or no backlogs orwhatever other new things people
come out with to try to like.
You know, they're going to atalk, so they gotta develop
something that is likerevolutionary or whatever.
(43:47):
Like they, they're the PMis the same way, but people
are like, oh, here's a newstrategy template, or here's
a new way to do your backlog,or a new tool how many times
we need to reinvent Jira.
I realize I said Jira,I had to get it outta my
mouth there real quick.
Every time they do thatit's under the guise of like
helping solve a problem.
Every time they do that, I feelthat every framework created
(44:09):
brings another complexityinto the field and also
potentially brings another.
Responsibility that nowyou also have to take
ownership of that as well.
Like if, someone came outwith a framework for PMs
to market their thing.
Like here's a twoby two marketing
framework or something.
Now we don't need marketers'cause the PMs do that as well.
Now here's AI prototyping tools.
(44:30):
Now we don't needdesigners or developers.
Ridiculous.
We'll let the PMs do that.
Yeah.
You know, 'cause again, like wedon't know what they do all day.
They do everything.
So you don't know what they do.
Right.
So you assume they do nothing.
Yeah.
In a nutshell, that'sbasically what Agile coach
is, or Scrum Masters.
I mean.
Yeah.
I agree with you.
There, there is no, there isno United sort of like, what is
(44:52):
product management all about?
Or what should it be all about?
And then a concerted effort tonurture folks into the field.
Right.
I would say there's eventhe funny thing about this
is there's even the last.
I'm not even calling for acentralized body of knowledge
or authority or whatever.
Even Agile has more structure,like as a community and like
what are our principles?
(45:12):
What do we believe inkind of stuff Like product
management has none, nothing.
It's literally whatever.
Anybody with the loudest,sexiest voice with the,
the trend that LinkedIndecides to promote this
week, like that, that'swhat product management is.
It's what we're saying reallyis to, there's no principles.
That's what I'm to,to be successful.
You just basically needto write down whatever the
(45:33):
heck it is that you wantother people to believe
and say, this is it folks.
Right?
Yeah.
And unfortunately there'stoo many of them out there
and, and when you look deeperinto what they're saying.
Some of it may float.
Right.
Most of it doesn't . yeah.
So that's the problem.
Yeah.
let's move to a summary herebecause I'm a little depressed.
(45:54):
I have to admit, afterthis podcast, so I don't
know what we can do to fixa PM industrial complex.
That would be a, that wouldbe a nice takeaway here.
Like if before you're gonnaspend money on a, on a
prototyping tool, or if you'regonna spend money ask yourself
like, does it, does it helpme do less things better?
Or is this adding moreresponsibilities that I have
to do now before you decideto spend all your monopoly
(46:17):
money on AI tools to helpyou prototype because you're
designers too slow or whatever.
How about you fix the.
The real issue there, you know?
Yeah, absolutelyagree with that.
Yeah.
I dunno.
On the 10 ladder rung of baselevel and then at the top of the
pyramid that the pyramid schemepyramid that we're climbing.
Like what, what, whatrung are we on now with
the industrial complex?
Oh, I think we're stillin a solid two or three.
(46:38):
Okay.
We haven't even, haven'teven made any progress.
Alright, well, anyway.
Product management, it isn't ajob, it's a socially acceptable
form of workplace masochism.
Sorry.
I was gonna say exploitation.
That was what I meant, butfor some reason in my brain
wouldn't let me let me tryanother one out on you.
Lemme try another one out on.
Let's go with the second one.
(46:59):
Pro product management.
It's we need an entireindustrial complex to teach all
of our executives and businesspeople around the world that
no two product managers are thesame, and their responsibilities
are not the same at any company.
And that the, the job itself asa role is totally not broken.
It's all fine.
So I don't know why I'mpitching you on these, but
I I, I am enjoying pitchingon these, these studies.
(47:19):
These are great.
It isn't, it isn't a job.
It's a role that takesthe skill of at least five
different people while onlypaying you for, for one.
Yeah.
What's there tonot agree on here?
Right?
I agree with all of those.
Listen, all of those things.
I mean, I enjoyproduct management.
I do have to say even afterall this but when you step
back and look at it it is apretty insane career path.
(47:42):
I'd say it is pretty insane.
Maybe product managersshould, take up like
doing magic or something.
Oh, I didn't know whereyou get flaming chainsaws.
Like what?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Tossing, tossing flame or tryingto catch flaming chainsaws.
You know, the funny thingis like, any product
manager listen to this.
Like, they're gonna belike, yeah, I know exactly
what you're talking about.
Nobody's gonna listen to this.
It's gonna be like, no,you guys aren't being
(48:03):
completely unreasonable.
I am the CEO of the product.
I've never worked at aplace where I didn't have,
and I don't work 60 hours.
I'd like to hear from the PMsthat are like, wow, I've got
equity at every company ever.
Or Why would you ever go to acompany and not have equity?
You know, maybe that's,maybe that's the
response we're gonna get.
Like the again, my challengethat I said earlier in the
podcast start writing downwhat you're doing, even one
(48:23):
day of your PM stuff andfigure out, hey, is this
stuff really getting meahead in product management?
Is it getting the product ahead?
With the customers.
Yeah.
You know, is it advancingor is it just like busy work
that really, you should justhave more people and you
know, what would you say?
Find out?
No.
Yeah.
Well that's, that's,that's true too.
I mean you say no to thepeople you can say no to.
(48:43):
Like, of course.
Yeah.
That would be, that'dbe the challenge there.
Indeed.
Anyway, like that wasthe podcast for today.
I like product management.
It's my job.
I quite enjoy it, butsometimes I'm like,
this job is ridiculous.
I think a lot ofpeople say that.
You know their own jobs thatare not in product management,
but pretty much everybodycould say that about their job.
That is in product management.
If you agree or disagree, let usknow in the comments down below,
(49:06):
and don't forget, to subscribeand we will see you next time.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Cardiac Cowboys
The heart was always off-limits to surgeons. Cutting into it spelled instant death for the patient. That is, until a ragtag group of doctors scattered across the Midwest and Texas decided to throw out the rule book. Working in makeshift laboratories and home garages, using medical devices made from scavenged machine parts and beer tubes, these men and women invented the field of open heart surgery. Odds are, someone you know is alive because of them. So why has history left them behind? Presented by Chris Pine, CARDIAC COWBOYS tells the gripping true story behind the birth of heart surgery, and the young, Greatest Generation doctors who made it happen. For years, they competed and feuded, racing to be the first, the best, and the most prolific. Some appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, operated on kings and advised presidents. Others ended up disgraced, penniless, and convicted of felonies. Together, they ignited a revolution in medicine, and changed the world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.