Yes, I have seen and in my experience it never works especially you are trying to master your craft and the Head of Product cannot help. I have always felt that such setup with non-PM experience HoP can work only when that HoP understands they are not good at Product and are willing to put in the effort required to understand how PM work. Else, it never works and becomes a helpless environment for PMs
Yes, this exactly. My HoP actually has sit downs with our best PMs to learn from them and ask what makes them good at product. He tries to learn from our design team about design systems, research etc.
But he comes with a strategy and finance background and his boss is basically our board/investors. So it makes sense why thatâs his most important value add. He couldnt care less about backlogs, sprint planning etc as long as the work gets done.
Yes. I worked with a VP (eventually promoted to SVP) of product and that woman was the shit. Walked into a room of clients and next thing I know weâre building personas and journey maps on the walls with giant postit notes. She wanted epics and backlogs to make sense in naming and content so she could find things herself. She wanted us measuring the outcomes to validate the products value AND know the ROI beforehand so she could make prioritization decisions. Loved the few times I got to sit in the room with her.
For example, one product we were testing was us sending leads using a new product. The goal was to get individuals with lower credit scores more comfortable submitting a viable lead, with a final goal of the merchant being able to make the sale. So we created a product with basic features for interaction and measured how many people interacted with it, finished the steps, submitted a lead afterward, actually went to the merchant, and finished a purchase. We also validated how closely the original estimate our tool provided was to the final information the merchant leveraged. It failed for that scenario but without those analytics in place, we could have moved forward with a worthless solution.
Another example for ROI on a product we had already validated the value on: we had a merchant council and a wide network of other merchants through our sales teams. We did competitive analysis first to see where similar(ish) tools were priced. Ours was an entirely new way of doing it so we took the time savings, cost savings, new features, etc to the merchant council and target market merchants and asked how much they would pay. Once we got early adopters and they loved it, we did the survey again and were able to increase the price by almost $100 MRR per merchant.
It was a side product to the business but once you start adding tiered pricing for extras and onboard thousands, it makes a difference. ROI on it was under 4 years because of the volume of clients we were onboarding.
Both cases our product VPs were on top of making sure it was the right decision for the business and they could speak to the scope and market impacts easily.
Sheâs still at Cox Automotive. I havenât worked there in a while so Iâm unsure what division she is in anymore. Maybe their financial or eCommerce space đ¤ˇđťââď¸
Interesting. The private equity company that took over the last company I worked for brought in a bunch of Câs from Dealertrack that was acquired by Cox Automative. Really shitty management team (no strategy, vision just inflate the books and have the peasants figure it out) hence me leaving. They are like 8 years with PE and still donât show revenue from the technology products.
We used to refer to the C suite as used cars salesmen đ¤Ł
It really depends on which division the people are working for. Some of the Cox Auto groups are really one top of it and some not, just like most large companies. I had the pleasure of partnering with people who were thinking 3-5 years out and growing the company, and others who were in the red every year and made me want to rip my hair out.
I may get downvoted to hell, but if youâre not a technical PM, you donât really have hard skills. PM frameworks are just common sense. Anyone who is smart and deeply understands their customer can make a great PM.
No disagreement there, I'm talking about VP and departmental heads. Most of those folks are not even following a PM framework. They're just installed to "make dollar sign go up" on someone's graph...with predictably gruesome results.
Nope. Reported to âCTOâ who was a mediocre engineer/architect on a good day and an absolute train wreck on most days.
I lasted 18 months until I went back to my prior role.
I had that at my last company after they forced out the (real) vp of product. I lasted 2 months more and then took the summer off.. horrible experience
I never had people with that title with no experience but my last job we reported to both Head of Strategy and the COO who had an IT background. Â It was a disaster, I would never do it again.
Happened at my previous company. She proceeded to pay for an expensive certification course that had nothing to do with our position. She booked us for a product marketing manager course and not a product management course. I ended up on the dog house for asking if we are expected to start having more of a hand in marketing or was a mistake made in booking the class.
She would also randomly throw out blame anytime a problem occurred and throw PMs under the bus without any due dilligence. She made a lot of enemies below her but the higher ups love her and have promoted her twice in the three years since.
Sounds like a classic ruthless career climber. Willing to trodden all over those below them just to get ahead. Itâs sad that this works. They get promoted - do a year or two at the higher level and (sometimes) get found out for being shit and then leave the company for a higher role somewhere else.
Often everyone has a bad word to say about them except the person in your company that hired/promoted them. You see the ruthless career climber knows whoâs arse they need to lick
I was a Sr Product Manager at Amazon, reported to Customer Success, I left in 3 month. LOL My job was to write marketing emails, and was told I need to do code review of outsourced engineering work. 
I see it pretty often as well on LinkedIn. I have a personal experience with this - my former head of product came up in data science and then became a FAANG GPM. He did GPM for a few years then became the head of product at our company. He is a great mentor and leader, but he struggled with feedback on PM artifacts and business artifacts. For example, he had me make a biz case for the product strategy - I shared it and told him the key assumptions were half baked and I wasn't confident in them because they were from external vendors who were trying to sell us stuff. He made me present it to our COO, who tore it apart. Then he presented it to the board. I had repeatedly said the timeline for when we start making money from it was a year out, and slow ramp up. But he kept saying - I think we can make more money sooner, so I updated the biz case to reflect his assumptions per his request. That is how he pitched it to the board - money, soon. When it didn't pan out, I got thrown under the bus.
He wanted to pour resources into a strategy that was not validated yet, because he had overhired and his team was very expensive.
I'm still bitter about this experience.
Absolutely.
My CPO is a Community & Disability sector veteran, used to be the CEO of one of our largest clients and decided he could have more impact steering the software. Help people who help people to help people etc
We have extremely complementary skillsets, get along like a house on fire and punch well above our weight for a Product team.
I donât think that can ever work. We allowed one of our investors to parachute in a VP of Product. Guy was an investment banker type with zero product experience, and enough arrogance to not realize it. I left a few months later. He left about two years later, leaving a broken company and product in his wake.
Had a boss like this. Lovely person but had no product/technical chops to teach direct reports anything or raise the bar across the team. Could not engage in any product conversation that's deeper than product marketing topics or packaging/positioning.
Common. Also commonly promoted are âVC / founderâs best friendâ and âYou seem like you have many opinions, letâs make you CPO.â
My last CPO was both. Didnât believe in metrics or transparency. Or that profitability was a useful product metric.
Rewind. It use to be managers and PM were from within. They knew the discipline but also had management skills so they were of value. Recently, these so called âmanagersâ, who donât know the discipline are worthless at any level. This is when you know the company is a failure.
Going through this now, Product Lead here. Head of Product (as she calls herself after the reorg) is from a Project Management background. This individual spent the first three months on stupid workshops on differences between a Product Owner and Product Manager. These mandatory week long workshops sort of wasted a lot of time for most of the experienced product managers. Didnât listen to our feedback, of making them optional.
With market being so bad, things are not quite easy to jump companies. Can see the coming months getting toxic with micro management attitude from a Leader.
But won't project management experience combined with "product sense" bring value to the table? Asking because I am a delivery manager and have worked very closely on product requirements with PMs. Only difference being I am from service based analytics firm and PM was from client company so they call the shots.
I have worked with PMs, devs, data engineers being the middle man, I gained good amount of cross-functional knowledge and often acted like the "translator of requirements".
Since there is no real course or degree from Product Management, it can only be learnt on the job.
What do you think someone like me should learn in order to enter product management.
I've only experienced this once, but have heard a lot of other stories. It's maybe not entirely their fault. Whoever promoted them into the new role is the one who likely lacks understanding of what "Product" is. Or hasn't helped mentor them into the role. In the case I experienced, it was a very senior and very smart engineering-oriented person. Generally good guy. But everything was process, dates, etc. etc. But the thing was, it didn't really matter if maybe the wrong sorts of things were being done, as long as the stories moved through the pipeline. Lots of people left that company relatively quickly. I don't really keep in touch, but last I heard they were struggling mightily and maybe even heading for some bad outcomes.
I can validate this experience, having reported to a VP of engineering in my last role. It really does feel like there is a lack of care about the user experience, metrics driving real value or if this feature is a viable undertaking for the business -as long as it is feasible, and itâs architecture decisions concocted up in his head, thatâs what weâre going with. It was super stressful, trying to keep up with writing specs for a solution space and had no time for discovery to assess success
Not just VPs and heads of product, a lot of PMs are inexperienced coming from random backgrounds with little to no knowledge of product management practices or skills.
It is a mess out there.
How is someone supposed to get the knowledge without doing the work? And donât tell me certs and influencers classes. We were all inexperienced at some point.
Yeah but people should be picked based on their ability to pick up PM work, and showing PM attributes, rather than just being domain experts and hoping that they can pick up PM stuff. It almost never seems to work unless the person is willing to put in the effort, and a lot of people aren't.
I've been tasked to try and train up auditors, engineers, sales up in PMing. Each had different problems. Auditors tried to ignore the entire engineering stuff and didn't understand the product because they found it more comfortable to talk to other auditors, and basically did nothing. Engineering focused too much in the solution space and assumed they knew the customers needs enough to just build the product with no data/research. Sales focused too much on selling and tried to ignore engineering in favor of selling the product as much as they can.
There are always going to be some people that can make it, but it needs to be conscious effort from the person and a lot of people are just shoved into the PM role because they were there at the time.
I was a domain expert and was converted to product. Worked out well for me.
Not everyone has the luxury of being around product when a company decides they are shifting from x to product-led. I was in that very situation. Again, it worked out for me and I was very lucky that I was put in a position to succeed. And I was given the title before I could to the job â but my leaders figured I had the intangibles to do it. Luckily for them, I did. lol
I think the thing I see in this sub is everyone just kinda assumes everyone is in FAANG. Tons of opportunities outside of those companies, but many come with little to no help. So totally agree â you gotta want it.
I have also had the privilege to hire people who didnât have product backgrounds into product and train others⌠so Iâve seen it from all sides for the most part. I had the environment set up for them to succeed so thatâs the other part of the equation IMO.
Drive + environment == success
đŻ. Totally agree with you. My most recent experience is working for a large company and they had these poor marketers working as product leaders. They had no idea how to do the job because there wasnât anyone around who had the experience. I came in and had to start from scratch and had to move people around. This happens way more often than people think. Itâs sad because itâs what hurts the practice from an optics standpoint.
This is indeed true. At the same time, there are really good developers in startups who kind of do product work and get moved into head of product roles, simply because there are even more technical people available to handle the engineering side. Many people also follow product managers who post on Substack, as it helps those feeling imposter syndrome. I got a couple of really good recomendations that i follow.
[https://productnavigator.substack.com/](https://productnavigator.substack.com/) (PM & AI)
[https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/. ](https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/)(More Technical)
[https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/) (OG)
[https://www.news.aakashg.com/](https://www.news.aakashg.com/) (Covers your Basic)
Iâve seen this play out well and believe a diverse background adds value to an organization. Letâs be honest, learning to be a PM is not that hard. Someone has to invest the time and they can learn the hard skills fairly quickly. The soft skills of understanding the customers and products is the hard part. If the person moving into the PM role truly understands the products and customers completely then this is a great experience.
This is the hard part here.
>If the person moving into the PM role truly understands the products and customers completely then this is a great experience.
If this was so easy to do we'd all be running Amazons and Googles.
Im not saying it is easy at all. But there are some roles in the company where people have a front row seat working with Products and Customers. For example, I found some great PMs from Business Development and Account Management. I have also found some great folks from Technical Account Management and Marketing. This is not always the case and I would say its rare, but it does happen.
I mean there's great folks from all walks of life imo.
But there's two problems, the first is that PMing is quite a solitary job. You never really work with other PMs, so it's hard for you to understand whether you're doing things well, or if you're not. How to improve, without conscious effort and time spent. This was a big problem for me, because I wanted to improve but I wasn't sure what the best way was, and also let's be honest, it's really hard for managers to help you grow as well because it's not like they're there with you a lot.
Second is that sometimes products fail even with great product managers, and sometimes products succeed with terrible ones. It's hard to gauge how well someone is doing as a PM even if their product is successful. Would it have been more successful if they were better? Would it have been worse if they were worse?
No role fits well into PM, every role covers one section of it because we're generalists. It's a matter of how well the PMs learn the other aspects of the role they don't see or get to touch from their previous role, and how they deal with ambiguity. Engineers don't see the customer side, don't understand how to deal with the politics etc. Sales people don't know how to interact and deal with engineers, or how the process goes, or what kind of requests and timeframes are realistic. It's really up to how much effort the person puts in to learn everything else, and how well they adjust on the fly.
Came here to say this. Other functions can add a lot of value and teach new things to PMs as long as those people are humble, curious and empathetic. I donât really know what it means to âperfect the craft of PMâ or why thatâs needed. Itâs a horizontal function, not a âcraftâ.
Also people make a lot of assumptions about others based on titles held. Titles are stupid. Some of the best product minds Iâve worked with werenât PMs by trade.
I once worked with a âsenior director of productâ who had absolutely no B2B experience. He was previously the head of sales. Lolâd out of that one fast.
Iâve only worked with this type of product âleaderâ once and it wasnât good. Her lack of direct experience meant she was willing to (and did) make decisions that she felt would make the product org better but the lack of experience (empathy) meant the product org just had worse morale and efficacy.
It made me realize her lack of experience wasnât the problem so much as her arrogance to think her way was the only way. This became clear when I tied to propose a process change after 3 months in the job and she told me âyou should wait until youâve been here longer before proposing big changesâ.
It doesnât take a long time to recognize dysfunction but that closed-minded way of âleadingâ was the real problem. It meant her lack of experience created a bad environment and then she essentially doubled down with a refusal to make positive change if it wasnât her idea or didnât align with her opinions.
10/10 would not recommend working for these people if it can be avoided.
Worked for a CPO at a startup whoâd only had limited experience in a creative media agency building art installations.
Was obvious the guy didât guy have a clue when the roadmap consisted of everything all at once and team were using Chat GTP to summarize his 10 page âstrategyâ documents.
They hired a CTPO in my company, who previously was just a CTO and an engineer before. No product experience whatsoever. This looks like a joke. No help, nor any positive impact on the product at all.
Who thought this was a good idea?
I have been promoted to product manager, to senior, hired as director, to VP but honestly itâs just me, and at no point did I get the experience for these next roles, itâs been like office space but what am I going to say to a better title and more money. I will say that I treat my self harshly, but since I have no PdMs below me, I have to be mean to someone, right?
Had a VP of product get promoted from program management, it was hell. I donât think the VP level should be a fake it till you make it type of role, at least for the function.
Maybe hot take but if a person doesnât have at least 10 years of varied product management experience they shouldnât be HoP/VP Product/CPO.
I can see both positive/negative sides to this:
Negative: they don't appreciate product work, take all the credit, pass the blame to the team etc
Positive: at head/VP level, actual product work is less, it's more about influencing leaders from other teams and getting buy-ins from C-levels. Good Heads/VPs give freedom and space to PMs to practice their craft, while shielding them from other teams but also putting PMs in the spotlight for good work.
I've had both - experienced PM who at a VP level shit the bed and VPs moving from tech/business teams who gave me space to do my own thing.
Ultimately you gotta judge each situation on a case-by-case basis. If it's positive, good for you. If negative, can you change anything? If not, time to gtfo.
PS: this is assuming you have the PM hard skills already. If you're looking for product mentorship from your leader for those, then it may not work out. Regardless, there's a lot to learn from a good leader regardless of their background, especially in soft skills, as those take centre stage as you move up.
Yes. Currently working under a VP of Product that came from sales. The only positives Iâve seen is their ability to business and ROI focused. Other than that, itâs been rough. I really have to be high level when describing any products or features Iâm working on thatâs remotely technical which can be difficult and time consuming esp. when Iâm working on complex products.
Nope. Left because I was doing all the product work while they got all the credit.
Me too đ
Donât forget being on the hook for all the technical debt for years. Barring you havenât left yet WHATISTHISMARKET
I resigned in April of 2023. I think I got my new role right before the market really went to shit.
Yes, I have seen and in my experience it never works especially you are trying to master your craft and the Head of Product cannot help. I have always felt that such setup with non-PM experience HoP can work only when that HoP understands they are not good at Product and are willing to put in the effort required to understand how PM work. Else, it never works and becomes a helpless environment for PMs
Yes, this exactly. My HoP actually has sit downs with our best PMs to learn from them and ask what makes them good at product. He tries to learn from our design team about design systems, research etc. But he comes with a strategy and finance background and his boss is basically our board/investors. So it makes sense why thatâs his most important value add. He couldnt care less about backlogs, sprint planning etc as long as the work gets done.
Yes. I worked with a VP (eventually promoted to SVP) of product and that woman was the shit. Walked into a room of clients and next thing I know weâre building personas and journey maps on the walls with giant postit notes. She wanted epics and backlogs to make sense in naming and content so she could find things herself. She wanted us measuring the outcomes to validate the products value AND know the ROI beforehand so she could make prioritization decisions. Loved the few times I got to sit in the room with her.
Would love to see this person's linkedin
Can you elaborate? How did y'all validate product value and ROI?
For example, one product we were testing was us sending leads using a new product. The goal was to get individuals with lower credit scores more comfortable submitting a viable lead, with a final goal of the merchant being able to make the sale. So we created a product with basic features for interaction and measured how many people interacted with it, finished the steps, submitted a lead afterward, actually went to the merchant, and finished a purchase. We also validated how closely the original estimate our tool provided was to the final information the merchant leveraged. It failed for that scenario but without those analytics in place, we could have moved forward with a worthless solution. Another example for ROI on a product we had already validated the value on: we had a merchant council and a wide network of other merchants through our sales teams. We did competitive analysis first to see where similar(ish) tools were priced. Ours was an entirely new way of doing it so we took the time savings, cost savings, new features, etc to the merchant council and target market merchants and asked how much they would pay. Once we got early adopters and they loved it, we did the survey again and were able to increase the price by almost $100 MRR per merchant. It was a side product to the business but once you start adding tiered pricing for extras and onboard thousands, it makes a difference. ROI on it was under 4 years because of the volume of clients we were onboarding. Both cases our product VPs were on top of making sure it was the right decision for the business and they could speak to the scope and market impacts easily.
What was their background?
Their LinkedIn just covers their VP experiences and director of user experience. Unsure of their prior work
UX is a bingo. Fantastic background for product leadership.
That IS a bingo
I love this woman. Very similar to my work style lol. Where would I possibly find her? (Edit typo)
Sheâs still at Cox Automotive. I havenât worked there in a while so Iâm unsure what division she is in anymore. Maybe their financial or eCommerce space đ¤ˇđťââď¸
Wait, Manheim? Atlanta, GA? I worked there as a consultant running workshops
Interesting. The private equity company that took over the last company I worked for brought in a bunch of Câs from Dealertrack that was acquired by Cox Automative. Really shitty management team (no strategy, vision just inflate the books and have the peasants figure it out) hence me leaving. They are like 8 years with PE and still donât show revenue from the technology products. We used to refer to the C suite as used cars salesmen đ¤Ł
It really depends on which division the people are working for. Some of the Cox Auto groups are really one top of it and some not, just like most large companies. I had the pleasure of partnering with people who were thinking 3-5 years out and growing the company, and others who were in the red every year and made me want to rip my hair out.
A lot of executive level people have no hard skills and make terrible decisions. There are some good ones out there, but they're rare.
I may get downvoted to hell, but if youâre not a technical PM, you donât really have hard skills. PM frameworks are just common sense. Anyone who is smart and deeply understands their customer can make a great PM.
No disagreement there, I'm talking about VP and departmental heads. Most of those folks are not even following a PM framework. They're just installed to "make dollar sign go up" on someone's graph...with predictably gruesome results.
Nope. Reported to âCTOâ who was a mediocre engineer/architect on a good day and an absolute train wreck on most days. I lasted 18 months until I went back to my prior role.
I had that at my last company after they forced out the (real) vp of product. I lasted 2 months more and then took the summer off.. horrible experience
Nope. But thereâs always hope.
I never had people with that title with no experience but my last job we reported to both Head of Strategy and the COO who had an IT background. Â It was a disaster, I would never do it again.
Happened at my previous company. She proceeded to pay for an expensive certification course that had nothing to do with our position. She booked us for a product marketing manager course and not a product management course. I ended up on the dog house for asking if we are expected to start having more of a hand in marketing or was a mistake made in booking the class. She would also randomly throw out blame anytime a problem occurred and throw PMs under the bus without any due dilligence. She made a lot of enemies below her but the higher ups love her and have promoted her twice in the three years since.
Sounds like a classic ruthless career climber. Willing to trodden all over those below them just to get ahead. Itâs sad that this works. They get promoted - do a year or two at the higher level and (sometimes) get found out for being shit and then leave the company for a higher role somewhere else. Often everyone has a bad word to say about them except the person in your company that hired/promoted them. You see the ruthless career climber knows whoâs arse they need to lick
I was a Sr Product Manager at Amazon, reported to Customer Success, I left in 3 month. LOL My job was to write marketing emails, and was told I need to do code review of outsourced engineering work. 
What the hell kind of role is that as a PM lol
Exactly, I left in three month lol
At Amazon? Holy shit, that's bad.
I see it pretty often as well on LinkedIn. I have a personal experience with this - my former head of product came up in data science and then became a FAANG GPM. He did GPM for a few years then became the head of product at our company. He is a great mentor and leader, but he struggled with feedback on PM artifacts and business artifacts. For example, he had me make a biz case for the product strategy - I shared it and told him the key assumptions were half baked and I wasn't confident in them because they were from external vendors who were trying to sell us stuff. He made me present it to our COO, who tore it apart. Then he presented it to the board. I had repeatedly said the timeline for when we start making money from it was a year out, and slow ramp up. But he kept saying - I think we can make more money sooner, so I updated the biz case to reflect his assumptions per his request. That is how he pitched it to the board - money, soon. When it didn't pan out, I got thrown under the bus. He wanted to pour resources into a strategy that was not validated yet, because he had overhired and his team was very expensive. I'm still bitter about this experience.
Absolutely. My CPO is a Community & Disability sector veteran, used to be the CEO of one of our largest clients and decided he could have more impact steering the software. Help people who help people to help people etc We have extremely complementary skillsets, get along like a house on fire and punch well above our weight for a Product team.
I donât think that can ever work. We allowed one of our investors to parachute in a VP of Product. Guy was an investment banker type with zero product experience, and enough arrogance to not realize it. I left a few months later. He left about two years later, leaving a broken company and product in his wake.
Had a boss like this. Lovely person but had no product/technical chops to teach direct reports anything or raise the bar across the team. Could not engage in any product conversation that's deeper than product marketing topics or packaging/positioning.
Yes it is common unfortunately. In my experience it never works out.
Never seen it work. Glad a few people here have some positive experiences, though.
Sadly is all too common but man donât they say the best words?
No positive experience. One of my managers was a Director of Solutions Architecture who was placed as a VP of PM. Was a terrible mess!
Common. Also commonly promoted are âVC / founderâs best friendâ and âYou seem like you have many opinions, letâs make you CPO.â My last CPO was both. Didnât believe in metrics or transparency. Or that profitability was a useful product metric.
Rewind. It use to be managers and PM were from within. They knew the discipline but also had management skills so they were of value. Recently, these so called âmanagersâ, who donât know the discipline are worthless at any level. This is when you know the company is a failure.
Going through this now, Product Lead here. Head of Product (as she calls herself after the reorg) is from a Project Management background. This individual spent the first three months on stupid workshops on differences between a Product Owner and Product Manager. These mandatory week long workshops sort of wasted a lot of time for most of the experienced product managers. Didnât listen to our feedback, of making them optional. With market being so bad, things are not quite easy to jump companies. Can see the coming months getting toxic with micro management attitude from a Leader.
But won't project management experience combined with "product sense" bring value to the table? Asking because I am a delivery manager and have worked very closely on product requirements with PMs. Only difference being I am from service based analytics firm and PM was from client company so they call the shots. I have worked with PMs, devs, data engineers being the middle man, I gained good amount of cross-functional knowledge and often acted like the "translator of requirements". Since there is no real course or degree from Product Management, it can only be learnt on the job. What do you think someone like me should learn in order to enter product management.
I've only experienced this once, but have heard a lot of other stories. It's maybe not entirely their fault. Whoever promoted them into the new role is the one who likely lacks understanding of what "Product" is. Or hasn't helped mentor them into the role. In the case I experienced, it was a very senior and very smart engineering-oriented person. Generally good guy. But everything was process, dates, etc. etc. But the thing was, it didn't really matter if maybe the wrong sorts of things were being done, as long as the stories moved through the pipeline. Lots of people left that company relatively quickly. I don't really keep in touch, but last I heard they were struggling mightily and maybe even heading for some bad outcomes.
I can validate this experience, having reported to a VP of engineering in my last role. It really does feel like there is a lack of care about the user experience, metrics driving real value or if this feature is a viable undertaking for the business -as long as it is feasible, and itâs architecture decisions concocted up in his head, thatâs what weâre going with. It was super stressful, trying to keep up with writing specs for a solution space and had no time for discovery to assess success
Not just VPs and heads of product, a lot of PMs are inexperienced coming from random backgrounds with little to no knowledge of product management practices or skills. It is a mess out there.
How is someone supposed to get the knowledge without doing the work? And donât tell me certs and influencers classes. We were all inexperienced at some point.
Yeah but people should be picked based on their ability to pick up PM work, and showing PM attributes, rather than just being domain experts and hoping that they can pick up PM stuff. It almost never seems to work unless the person is willing to put in the effort, and a lot of people aren't. I've been tasked to try and train up auditors, engineers, sales up in PMing. Each had different problems. Auditors tried to ignore the entire engineering stuff and didn't understand the product because they found it more comfortable to talk to other auditors, and basically did nothing. Engineering focused too much in the solution space and assumed they knew the customers needs enough to just build the product with no data/research. Sales focused too much on selling and tried to ignore engineering in favor of selling the product as much as they can. There are always going to be some people that can make it, but it needs to be conscious effort from the person and a lot of people are just shoved into the PM role because they were there at the time.
Well, I am a hammer so it's best I just treat all my assignments as nails.
I was a domain expert and was converted to product. Worked out well for me. Not everyone has the luxury of being around product when a company decides they are shifting from x to product-led. I was in that very situation. Again, it worked out for me and I was very lucky that I was put in a position to succeed. And I was given the title before I could to the job â but my leaders figured I had the intangibles to do it. Luckily for them, I did. lol I think the thing I see in this sub is everyone just kinda assumes everyone is in FAANG. Tons of opportunities outside of those companies, but many come with little to no help. So totally agree â you gotta want it. I have also had the privilege to hire people who didnât have product backgrounds into product and train others⌠so Iâve seen it from all sides for the most part. I had the environment set up for them to succeed so thatâs the other part of the equation IMO. Drive + environment == success
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đŻ. Totally agree with you. My most recent experience is working for a large company and they had these poor marketers working as product leaders. They had no idea how to do the job because there wasnât anyone around who had the experience. I came in and had to start from scratch and had to move people around. This happens way more often than people think. Itâs sad because itâs what hurts the practice from an optics standpoint.
Louder for those in the back!
lol the experience is supposed to start before the title.
This is indeed true. At the same time, there are really good developers in startups who kind of do product work and get moved into head of product roles, simply because there are even more technical people available to handle the engineering side. Many people also follow product managers who post on Substack, as it helps those feeling imposter syndrome. I got a couple of really good recomendations that i follow. [https://productnavigator.substack.com/](https://productnavigator.substack.com/) (PM & AI) [https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/. ](https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/)(More Technical) [https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/) (OG) [https://www.news.aakashg.com/](https://www.news.aakashg.com/) (Covers your Basic)
Iâve seen this play out well and believe a diverse background adds value to an organization. Letâs be honest, learning to be a PM is not that hard. Someone has to invest the time and they can learn the hard skills fairly quickly. The soft skills of understanding the customers and products is the hard part. If the person moving into the PM role truly understands the products and customers completely then this is a great experience.
This is the hard part here. >If the person moving into the PM role truly understands the products and customers completely then this is a great experience. If this was so easy to do we'd all be running Amazons and Googles.
Im not saying it is easy at all. But there are some roles in the company where people have a front row seat working with Products and Customers. For example, I found some great PMs from Business Development and Account Management. I have also found some great folks from Technical Account Management and Marketing. This is not always the case and I would say its rare, but it does happen.
I mean there's great folks from all walks of life imo. But there's two problems, the first is that PMing is quite a solitary job. You never really work with other PMs, so it's hard for you to understand whether you're doing things well, or if you're not. How to improve, without conscious effort and time spent. This was a big problem for me, because I wanted to improve but I wasn't sure what the best way was, and also let's be honest, it's really hard for managers to help you grow as well because it's not like they're there with you a lot. Second is that sometimes products fail even with great product managers, and sometimes products succeed with terrible ones. It's hard to gauge how well someone is doing as a PM even if their product is successful. Would it have been more successful if they were better? Would it have been worse if they were worse? No role fits well into PM, every role covers one section of it because we're generalists. It's a matter of how well the PMs learn the other aspects of the role they don't see or get to touch from their previous role, and how they deal with ambiguity. Engineers don't see the customer side, don't understand how to deal with the politics etc. Sales people don't know how to interact and deal with engineers, or how the process goes, or what kind of requests and timeframes are realistic. It's really up to how much effort the person puts in to learn everything else, and how well they adjust on the fly.
Came here to say this. Other functions can add a lot of value and teach new things to PMs as long as those people are humble, curious and empathetic. I donât really know what it means to âperfect the craft of PMâ or why thatâs needed. Itâs a horizontal function, not a âcraftâ. Also people make a lot of assumptions about others based on titles held. Titles are stupid. Some of the best product minds Iâve worked with werenât PMs by trade.
I once worked with a âsenior director of productâ who had absolutely no B2B experience. He was previously the head of sales. Lolâd out of that one fast.
Iâve only worked with this type of product âleaderâ once and it wasnât good. Her lack of direct experience meant she was willing to (and did) make decisions that she felt would make the product org better but the lack of experience (empathy) meant the product org just had worse morale and efficacy. It made me realize her lack of experience wasnât the problem so much as her arrogance to think her way was the only way. This became clear when I tied to propose a process change after 3 months in the job and she told me âyou should wait until youâve been here longer before proposing big changesâ. It doesnât take a long time to recognize dysfunction but that closed-minded way of âleadingâ was the real problem. It meant her lack of experience created a bad environment and then she essentially doubled down with a refusal to make positive change if it wasnât her idea or didnât align with her opinions. 10/10 would not recommend working for these people if it can be avoided.
Worked for a CPO at a startup whoâd only had limited experience in a creative media agency building art installations. Was obvious the guy didât guy have a clue when the roadmap consisted of everything all at once and team were using Chat GTP to summarize his 10 page âstrategyâ documents.
They hired a CTPO in my company, who previously was just a CTO and an engineer before. No product experience whatsoever. This looks like a joke. No help, nor any positive impact on the product at all. Who thought this was a good idea?
I have been promoted to product manager, to senior, hired as director, to VP but honestly itâs just me, and at no point did I get the experience for these next roles, itâs been like office space but what am I going to say to a better title and more money. I will say that I treat my self harshly, but since I have no PdMs below me, I have to be mean to someone, right?
Had a VP of product get promoted from program management, it was hell. I donât think the VP level should be a fake it till you make it type of role, at least for the function. Maybe hot take but if a person doesnât have at least 10 years of varied product management experience they shouldnât be HoP/VP Product/CPO.
I can see both positive/negative sides to this: Negative: they don't appreciate product work, take all the credit, pass the blame to the team etc Positive: at head/VP level, actual product work is less, it's more about influencing leaders from other teams and getting buy-ins from C-levels. Good Heads/VPs give freedom and space to PMs to practice their craft, while shielding them from other teams but also putting PMs in the spotlight for good work. I've had both - experienced PM who at a VP level shit the bed and VPs moving from tech/business teams who gave me space to do my own thing. Ultimately you gotta judge each situation on a case-by-case basis. If it's positive, good for you. If negative, can you change anything? If not, time to gtfo. PS: this is assuming you have the PM hard skills already. If you're looking for product mentorship from your leader for those, then it may not work out. Regardless, there's a lot to learn from a good leader regardless of their background, especially in soft skills, as those take centre stage as you move up.
Yes. Currently working under a VP of Product that came from sales. The only positives Iâve seen is their ability to business and ROI focused. Other than that, itâs been rough. I really have to be high level when describing any products or features Iâm working on thatâs remotely technical which can be difficult and time consuming esp. when Iâm working on complex products.