PM is a really awful position, these slick guys come in and take all the credit for the work of the engineering and design teams. It's demoralizing. A better setup I've seen is having no PMs, engineering and design team members stay on top of analytics, user feedback, market trends, business concerns, etc. Everybody provides product and process feedback at monthly meetings. It's way more empowering and agile. We don't need PMs!
> these slick guys come in and take all the credit for the work of the engineering and design teams.
The PMs that take all the credit are bad PMs. The best PMs I've worked with do a ton of behind-the-scenes work and give all the credit to the team. Having a PM that takes care of...
> analytics, user feedback, market trends, business concerns, etc.
..will boost productivity for any engineer or designer.
But when you "boost productivity" by taking away ownership of the product you're trying to turn the engineers into code monkeys that implement your wishes without too much questioning. In reality it decreases productivity because you've taken away a big part of the fun of building things, the connection with the users and the business. And it drives away the better people.
To be fair (and I am not trying to defend these 'Slick guys'), sometimes there is a lot more happening behind closed doors that a PM might let on. Fights for resources, maintaining a current team, hiring, ownership, etc.
Oftentimes those people trying to portray a 'Slick' exterior are doing so due to the need to portray a sense of success/confidence for their team, to make sure they retain their existing budget and that the team doesn't get moved to other projects or terminated entirely.
Man I have to say... from what I've seen over the last 20 years in the industry, this is a very junior-minded position to take. If someone said, "We don't need UX design," or "We don't need DevOps," they'd be laughed out of the building. It takes a village... takes a collection of talented people working in unison to have a successful product.
It's horrendously inefficient for an organization to take away Product Managers. If you want to bring every designer and every developer and ever sales person... and basically your whole company to a meeting to make a decision... maybe you'll get away with cutting the Product Manager role... But there's so much inherent compromise and horse trading as part of every product launch / sprint.
Without someone to organize all that, you're going to waste a lot of time and force a lot of highly skilled people to do things that aren't in their wheelhouse. And then... at the end of the day... who is on the hook for strategy? "Oh, hey we built the wrong MVP so I guess we'll sack some of our <rolls the dice...> Visual Designers!" That makes no sense.
Any complex system or organization will need a management layer... think of them as lubrication if you want... to help all the different parts move efficiently. The team is responsible for the success of the endeavor, anyone worth keeping in an organization knows how to give praise where it's due... if you have individuals trying to take credit for teamwork... that's an issue you should take up with HR.
On behalf of all PMs, I'm sorry you had this experience. Good PMs tend to do just the opposite. If you are in this situation now, I encourage you to share this feedback to the person that is most likely to help change it (ideally with the PM directly?).
As a company scales, there is a tendency to embrace specializations through a division of labor. Of course, different companies adopt different models for various reasons. e.g. Do you need dedicated QA or does that fall upon the developers? With these decisions come trade-offs because you can't optimize for everything. Your proposed model can work, but is far less common in large tech companies because of the overhead of coordinating/communicating across lots of people which tends to fall upon PMs.
I think you're pointing out what can happen if PMing isn't done correctly. If you have worked with a good and skilled PM, you'll feel quite the opposite.
