The Product person spends all their time understanding the market and figuring what to build, who to target, how to work with marketing/sales, how to price it, what the competition is doing, syncing with other PMs to make sure everything is coherent, communicating around the org to people who need to know, answering questions from legal/accounting/sales etc. The engineering manager can focus on how to build it, who should work on what, engineer's careers, technical challenges, team stuff and many other things depending on the circumstances, and the program manager can project manage, focus on syncing eng efforts across teams, moving blockers etc.
Those three things are an enormous amount of work, each one. If anyone tries to do more than one they will suck. There are exceptions... some people are able to pull it off. Those people should go start a company and not be PMs.
At least in my experience, good engineering managers had a lot of input into the product function because they were paying attention to the customers and had insight into what could be built - part of the reason they are a manager is they have more than eng skills. The PM and EM need a good relationship and usually do, at least at Google. The program manager has less input to what to build.
Outside of Google the product management function does indeed seem to be... pretty awful for everyone involved. Bad PMs annoy everyone and give the function a bad rep, good PMs come in and are treated poorly (due to bad function rep) or have silly expectations put on them due to a lack of understanding of the function, and leave.
> Outside of Google the product management function does indeed seem to be... pretty awful for everyone involved.
If the best product managers are at google, then that's very damning, given that Google are notorious for having awful product sense. I'm not convinced that's true though. I've worked with good product people at small companies.
I'm not saying that - I'm saying the job and whole situation around it is pretty awful, for everyone, outside Google. And it's a sweeping generalization. There are obviously going to be pockets where the opposite is true.
That said - I don't think Google PMs are notorious for having awful product sense. They do seem to get hired at a lot of places. And product sense is a wishy washy term. If someone tells you they have great product sense ask them why they don't have a billion dollars.
I can’t judge Google PMs. But Google the company’s products are not good. Often they start out good, and then get progressively worse, stagnate, or are killed off entirely!
Regarding why product people don’t have $1m. I would suggest that building a great product is not sufficient for that, you also need to be able to sell it.
>> I would suggest that building a great product is not sufficient for that, you also need to be able to sell it.
I might be putting toooo much responsibility on product, but realistically to have a good product in a good market, it has to be sellable - ie built with the distribution in mind so that an economical go-to-market is within the control of the company. For large enterprise customers the product might built with direct sales in mind - high price, high value, features large enterprise need, sufficiently defined buyer group etc. If one doesn't factor that into what product to build for what market, I don't think they have product sense.
In the most functional engineering orgs I've seen, this is the correct setup. There are clear and concise goals for each. (Everyone should know a bit about the other ofc.)
Most super early startups I've seen w/ serious problems can be traced back to the founder doing all three and sucking at each.
Only thing I'd say is that it's not just PM/EM that do scoping and input on product but the whole eng team. The healthiest teams I've been in used that setup and it worked really well.
Those three things are an enormous amount of work, each one. If anyone tries to do more than one they will suck. There are exceptions... some people are able to pull it off. Those people should go start a company and not be PMs.
At least in my experience, good engineering managers had a lot of input into the product function because they were paying attention to the customers and had insight into what could be built - part of the reason they are a manager is they have more than eng skills. The PM and EM need a good relationship and usually do, at least at Google. The program manager has less input to what to build.
Outside of Google the product management function does indeed seem to be... pretty awful for everyone involved. Bad PMs annoy everyone and give the function a bad rep, good PMs come in and are treated poorly (due to bad function rep) or have silly expectations put on them due to a lack of understanding of the function, and leave.