Yeah, I think it's massively under-discussed that
product management quality across the industry is generally very poor.
There are multiple manifestations of this but the main factors IMO are: how involved is management in the product? How good is your product definition process and talent?
For big companies the problem tends to be more the former. Product management talent tends to be solid, but upper management is checked out of the process and instead overly focused on non-product areas of the company. Product management functions (PMs + engineers) tend to be flying alone with low external guidance.
For small companies the problem tends to be the latter. Product management is deeply enmeshed with upper management (because what else would upper management be doing at that scale?) but they are bad at it.
Both result in shipping the wrong product. For startups shipping the wrong product is deadly, but for large profitable companies they can keep shipping bad product for years. IMO this is where Google is at - they fundamentally do not have the institutional capacity to ship great product.
My impression (which is a few years old now since I left Goog) is that management understands the problem exists, but seem to believe that they can fix it by iterating on the product management process, but in a way that does not require SVPs and VPs to directly engage with product. I fundamentally disagree with this premise - it is not possible to ship product in a coherent manner with a surface area this large unless the most senior levels of management directly engage with product management.
And ultimately poor product definition and prioritization is an order of magnitude greater source of low labor productivity than any kind of individual-level slackage.
