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0 pointsmavelikara4y ago0 comments

> The domain is complex, and customers try to find solutions just like the PM. But, as a PM you have the benefit of talking to many customers so you see common patterns and can often see the ‘problem behind the problem’.

I agree to most of this. The team - by virtue of building and operating the software product catering for many customers - can often understand the customer usecases and solution better than any one customer. But it is the team, as a whole, where this expertise resides. Not one member of the team who happens to have a particular role and title.

> I do not see the link to the true Scotsman argument

By adding the word "effective" in:

> effective PMs know better what customers want than customers themselves.

you seemed to imply that any counterexample of a PM who is not doing this as not a true effective PM, and hence, not worth discussing.

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geertj4y ago

> But it is the team, as a whole, where this expertise resides. Not one member of the team who happens to have a particular role and title.

Which is why I made the distinction between accountable and responsible. I totally agree that it’s the team as a whole that’s responsible for the output of the team, and that it’s essential that everybody on the team has a customer focus.

> you seemed to imply that any counterexample of a PM who is not doing this as not a true effective PM, and hence, not worth discussing.

In my opinion, the better a PM understands their customers, the more effective they are in their role. I had thought that this would be relatively noncontroversial. It certainly wasn’t a dig against a some subset of my profession. Virtually all PMs that I’ve worked with see this as core to their role.

Now I am curious, was there anything in the wording of my reply, or in your past experience working with PMs, that caused you to reply?

mavelikaraOP4y ago

> Now I am curious, was there anything in the wording of my reply, or in your past experience working with PMs, that caused you to reply?

No, it is not anything you said specifically, Geert. But I have direct and indirect knowledge of PMs who adopt the "All the shipped features were my ideas, the bugs and tech debt were added by engineers" attitude. This thread too gave my that vibe.

I have written more of my opinions on the PM orgs at [1] and [2]. Happy to chat more, if you are interested - my email is on my profile.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28965764

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27391220

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