Responsive PMs are the worst

sept 30 2024

Reminds me of that old 30 Rock gag...

We might not be the best people, but we’re not the worst - graduate students are the worst!

The old saw among sales people at enterprise software companies:

The PMs never listen to us! We're out here killing ourselves with customers and those darn PMs just don't listen.

And it's true. PM as a profession has gotten very technological. Very compartmentalized and market unaware. Lots of PMs don't listen.

But. Be that as it may. Having witnessed the other side of this lately - HIGHLY RESPONSIVE PMs - I've concluded that the alternative is far worse.

Here is the end of that classic sentence, for context:

The PMs never listen to us! We're out here killing ourselves with customers and those darn PMs just don't listen. We've been asking them for spinning icons for 6 months and they never do it.

The sad part about modern PMming is that it's gone totally native inside the "agile" dev cycle. The process has ate up a lot of PMs. The work became

WRITE THE TICKETS

LET'S GO

HURRY UP

WE. NEED. MORE. TICKETS.

When you have a savvy sales org they figure this out right away. They just keep salmoning their way upstream trying to understand why the PMs don't respond to their OBVIOUSLY brilliant ideas. To be sure, this is what you pay sales reps to do - work the system. PMs are outgunned.

PMs are now "waiters." They start creating tickets like a firehose, seeking the approval of those who are ordering. LOOK HOW PRODUCTIVE I AM!! I CREATED ALL THE TICKETS!

Workin' for tips.

Scrutiny goes out the window, judgement goes out the window. Strategy - ie the series of well-considered choices made to advance the success of the product and the company - goes out the window.

It's a symptom I watch for now. It means the PM team is in a deep hole.

Some reactions:

from John Bartlett

I would argue that those aren’t so much characteristics of modern PM so much as those that have never worked in or been trained by an organization that understands and values the role. What you describe is really a product owner role which is has been given the title of pm but without the experience or the mandate to do the job. So they go with what they know - grooming the backlog, creating stories, managing requests from internal stakeholders. It’s not their fault, taking orders