In my time at Google I never understood on what criteria young PMs were hired. The company would regularly reject engineering candidates who had very successful solo projects because they didn't correctly answer the generic Comp Sci and how-do-you-scale-search questions, but at the same time the vast majority of PMs I encountered were just a year or two out of undergrad, and had never built a product, never launched a product, never demonstrated any aptitude for connecting with users. They were certainly personable, and overall were good communicators, but not --as a rule-- inventive or imaginative.
This was one of my biggest frustrations that weighed on my decision to leave the company. The PMs I worked directly with rarely felt a true sense of ownership and pride over the roadmap and evolution of value to users. They never bothered to think how the future was evolving. They seemed to be brought in on pretty regular rotation with no attachment. They were mostly interested in seeing product management as some kind of accounting/ROI management problem. They would go through a long list of line items and try to assign priority and tried to remove as many things as they could. They also wanted to make the few things they did commit to seem much bigger than they actually were. I most directly saw this with Android Camera framework and APIs. The worst part was sitting through feedback meetings from developers. Instead of truly listening and challenging their current views, they would try to fit the feedback to their current view and dismiss a lot of really important insights from the field.
After doing mobile dev that has worked directly with the Android Camera API, it shows. I believe Snapchat notoriously was held up, back in the day at least, in rolling out Android features due to how much of a mess it was.
Bluetooth has traditionally been another disaster zone. The low level APIs for interfacing with hardware shows a distinct lack of care for how the developer experiences things.
And on a meta level, either I'm improving way more than I give myself credit for, but whenever I dive under the hood these days of certain Android libraries, the underlying quality and elegance of design seems to be decreasing over time and questioning how certain PMs let some instances of kludges past their review process that I, who will never, ever pass a Google interview process, would reject completely out of hand if someone put them in a PR to a codebase I managed. I'm noticing a certain amount of increasing Reflection usage bleeding into libraries these days that you would expect at a widget factory who lost the original source code, not a FAANG company inside their own core platform. It betrays either a loss of control of the situation by product managers, or, more likely, teams are increasingly not able to interact across project departments and collaboration is being replaced with increasing inter-team hostility/indifference.
I don't know anything about the inner workings of Google. However, if they were all mostly doing that kind of thing, it's probably what was expected and rewarded by whoever they worked for.
If, for example, finishing projects on the original projected timeline is heavily weighted...you get the ruthless scope cutting you mention. Or, if compensation is tied to team size, you get empire building.
Yes thats exactly it. the problem was in OKR setting and expectations. The PMs got unfairly rewarded for things that didn't matter. Android releases on a regular cadence and I think just meeting the release deadline with some set of namable new things was enough to receive the bulk of performance compensation. It didn't matter if app developers were still jumping through painful hoops to get Camera detection, usage, debugging, etc working across a highly fragmented ecosystem of chips and sensors. It wasn't part of the OKR to fix it, and it certainly wasn't fixable within an OKR planning cycle.
Yes and in Android, where I observed this, it's going to some of the worst. It was a defensive move instead of true insight into what mobile look like. Perhaps the one driving differentiated vision might be "open". But as the OEM world increasingly moves towards a collection of Apples, longevity and followthrough are going to be tough to deliver. I still think there is some great product muscle in areas like Google Cloud. Despite being highly competitive with AWS and Azure, at least it's born out of a desire to share their own best infrastructure with the rest of the world. They should be doing this and feels important. Despite Google shuttering the game studio, I think products like Stadia are going to do well, built on the backbone of Youtube (casting streams or jumping into existing with your game) and Assistant (in game tutorials/help). When you are as big as Google some things are just going to be sputtering and unfortunately that was in the area I worked.
Microsoft went exactly the same route. After certain critical mass of PMs were achieved, things went only downhill. I am not saying engineers somehow are superior but the fact is that there is no real hiring criteria for PMs so overall talent pool gets very diluted very quickly. Good PMs like Spolesky are worth gold but there is no way to identify them during interviews. Now that Google has 6 versions of chat programs, GMail UX that is mess, Maps that are stagnant - you can see same outcome that Microsoft saw.
Once a PM and I were working on something and we came to a task where we needed to spend an hour or two repeatedly clicking through some boilerplate webforms in our own product, for an incredibly stupid reason, at the behest of a significant customer. I shrugged and told the PM I would do it, and I was kind of looking forward to listening to a podcast and mindlessly clicking. She told me that I had a valuable skill set and it wasn't a good use of my time and that she would do it instead. I really wanted to ask, but thought better of it, "Don't you have a valuable skill set?"
I guess the charitable interpretation is that she wanted to listen to a podcast (or equivalent). The less charitable interpretation is that she didn't value her own contributions.
Maybe she had a free hour. That happens. I usually have a bunch of things being worked on, but from time to time the stars align in a weird way and I'm waiting for some inputs or for some long-term process to finish and may have a couple of hours where I don't have anything specific to do. I won't start anything major because I'd have to drop it soon then, but I may go read some articles, or listen to a talk, or update docs, or clean up some minor tech debt. Or maybe do some stupid stuff that needs to be done and can be done by anybody, but this time it's me. Maybe that was such a moment for her, nothing to do with skills. Even very skilled people sometimes have to do some boring work.
Most PMs at most big companies are not that way. They just build what they're told and make incremental improvements on whatever it is they built. Big companies are slow, most people working at big companies do not care much about their problem spaces. You can tell in the quality and usefulness of the products, especially for software. Hardware seems different.
I feel the "PM as CEO of the product" (aka, Product Owner) paradimng is completely wrong. PMs become very political fast, and often don't have qualms to undermine other parts/products of the company in order to advance their own.
Since often they are not the ones doing the hiring of engineers, they really don't care/have no qualms of the long term engineering needs (both personel/morale, and architecture). True company CEOs have to think about engineering personal needs all the time as recruiting is hard. PM/PO just don't care as they don't have to deal with true consequences of their decissions on the people that actually get the work done. I have seen narcistic PMs completely destroy team morales, and have engineers after engineers jus transfer out their teams.
Also, Google PMs have earned a 'toxic' reputation in the industry. They are just too political. Might be ok for a large company, but they can be poison to smaller ones.
I really haven't seen a tech company with a PM role which provided real value. Typically the role ends up contending for scope with manager/engineer responsibilities or serving as a glorified task manager. The industry just doesn't have a good way to measure the performance of "product" and as such the PM can make good decisions or bad decisions and there is no measurement or mechanism to course correct.
Occasionally I've seen a "product research" role where individuals focus on characterizing the problems customer's face, running user studies, or other analysis. This role provided immense value as it's easily a full-time job just talking to customers and bucketing their pain points.
The PM I've worked with the most over the past few years is excellent acting as a sort of coordinator role, as you describe - maintaining relationships with UX and engineering across organizations, making sure UXR is involved, having an overarching vision, etc.
Back a bit (like a decade ago) when I still had PMs ours spent a lot of time on vendor and contract management, filtering/prioritizing cross team requests (of which we had many), and generally making sure that features got compelted in an order that kept our external partners satisfied. All important work, and work I was very glad to not have to do (except maybe the prioritization.)
Agree 100%. They play a very different, and very odd, ball game compared to what you have to play at a startup. 90% of the noise in my career is one tier up managers think they're doing what their managers manager wants, but really they're just being combative.
PM is the 'centre of the product' : all the responsibility, but none of the direct power.
It's an important job and when done well makes a huge difference.
PM's have to have incredibly good 'EI' as they like to call it, it's a skill that is basically unrecognized by 1-dimensional engineers who are (sometimes) apparently so brilliant they cannot even have the self awareness to recognize their toxically inefficient communication abilities, as exemplified over and over in the article.
(Edit: FYI this is a far too common theme in tech, wherein you find people that are legitimately great thinkers, and are recognized as such, but have incredibly poor communications skills and I feel that that the confidence derived from their legitimate brilliance, combined with a hint of power, makes them even more unwilling to grasp the fact.)
I wonder what Google would have been with great organizational leadership?
I guess we can be thankful that their style worked well enough to make Google good at what it is, and that I guess we're all a series of 'peaks and valleys' in terms of skills, but I'll never understand how bizarrely bad some folks are at not being able to grasp organizational, social, systems, leadership, abstract problems that don't map well to engineering style problems. Edit: Though it's a different domain of skills, and often harder to recognize material talent, great marketing teams are worth as least as much as great engineering teams in most situations.
Does interpreting the descriptions '1-dimensional engineers' or 'it's common in tech' to imply 'an entire job family' suggest low or high reading comprehension?
This thread is littered with examples lack of understanding of PM's (and other) roles, to the point wherein it's almost bigotry.
It's understandable that many people don't know what 'marketing' or 'finance' is, but to project their ignorance, and couple it with with moralizing suggests exactly the kind of insufferable arrogance I'm pointing out.
From this thread:
"The value creators (engineering/programming/creative/design/product) people have been pushed aside for the value extractors (finance/managers/marketing/oversight) and now the extractors are creating the product. It is a completely backwards setup that is causing products to suffer."
(This one is wrong well past the point of being offensive)
"After certain critical mass of PMs were achieved, things went only downhill. I"
" I really haven't seen a tech company with a PM role which provided real value."
I started out as an Engineer and often felt this way as well, but having now played a variety of roles, I'm basically embarrassed at my own organizational illiteracy.
It's common in tech and it's embarrassing for the 'job family'.
The difficult thing about talking about project management is that it is so inconsistent at different organizations that makes it impossible to talk about it without having a lot of context.
I worked at companies where project managers had very strong technical background and experience, but I also worked at a company where project managers were only a little technical, but had very strong project management skills. Then there is the other end of the spectrum, where project managers are simply incompetence. They got promoted to become a project manager with almost no knowledge about it and also no willingness to learn it properly and become good at it.
The latter (incompetence PM) is awful for any type of engineering work. And some companies make it even worse by making engineers report directly to those project managers.
The first type (technical project manager) is obviously harder to build, because not many engineers want to become project managers, and not many engineering teams are able to navigate without a good product team in organizations that don't have a solid engineering culture (e.g. traditional companies). So you often find companies with the second type. And even then I think it’s best if there is a clear separation of concerns between product and development teams. A product manager/team that takes care of product concerns but not engineers themselves. While they work with each other, engineers should report directly to a technical lead that understands their efforts and needs.
Sundar worked as an engineer, management consultant and product manager before moving up the management ranks at Google. So labeling him as a PM isn't accurate.
For the life of me I don’t understand why it isn’t common practice to simply have the team report strictly to a technical lead with a project manager working under the lead as part of the team but only responsible for keeping tabs on available resources and making schedules work. They should report the current logistical situation to the tech lead so the overarching plan can be adjusted as needed. In my mind the PM is a specialist not a leader.
simple: most places view technical people (coders at least) as someone who is making money when they code. Its in-house outsourcing. Senior devs end up jumping ship when they realize they could make more money consulting.
I would tweak your description and convert the PM role to QC / Support.
Page's "perfect search" vision, the idea that you can get everything you could need so that you can work on important problems, is the perfect specimen idea from an engineering mind. The problematization of experience is a great tool, but it is not an end, and of the options available it is a pretty humble one.
If you have ever seen a highly automated dairy farm, cows have everything they need to work on important problems too, but they're cows, hooked up to machines that remove every aspect of what makes them cows other than how they serve the machines they are connected to. Maybe we could use a variation of Neuralink to connect all those cows' brains for distributed processing to solve important problems for us, and when they're done, we eat them, or use them for decorative materials. With a sufficiently random drip of seratonin and dopamine, they'd even be happy, if that were meaningful to them.
I like that the first incarnation of Google was called "BackRub," and they even had masseuses on-site is a pretty unselfconscious and intimate expression of what actuated him. The only thing that separates those cows from people
in a mind indexed like that is probably not sufficient to prevent it from collapsing them into indifference. If cows had a version of "don't be evil," from our perspective it would be cow-evil and not even register as something we needed to consider. It's just an entertaining article from the perspective of the writer, but I can't help but suspect what Page's vision looks like now is informed by the omniscience of google's data and AI, and the ethics of that perspective are not the same as those cows.
We may be into the territory of having a Dr. Manhattan problem.
The value creators (engineering/programming/creative/design/product) people have been pushed aside for the value extractors (finance/managers/marketing/oversight) and now the extractors are creating the product. It is a completely backwards setup that is causing products to suffer.
Nothing worse than knowing what a product needs and being overridden by project managers with no experience shipping product or fighting to put in quality or features the users want. Somehow the MBAs and PMs are now seen as product value creators when they are part of the value extraction team, it doesn't and won't work.
Most developers know now that adding to a product or putting in time to get to a more polished post-production model rather than pre-production only can cost you perception due to taking longer, it is a major problem with our industry today.
Imagine the executives of the movie company telling what directors, technical and creative people should and make. Or a novel written by the publisher. It isn't what anyone wants. The value creation needs to go to the value creators AND they need freedom to control their tasks and flows. What happens is people that are capable of shipping products people want, end up in a tasked system where they are given daily/weekly tasks from people that have never shipped. It is frustrating and destroys value.
This is an age old problem highlighted in "How Software Companies Die" but really you could say how creative companies die. Software and technology is closer to art than business in many cases. You can't force creativity into a 3 hour task planned by an outside project manager that doesn't understand what it takes to ship a product themselves. There are some great project managers that do, but they end up just making things or their own company because it is such a unique subset of the overall pool.
> Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf.
> “It’s ok! I have great advisors standing on the shore telling me what to do!” they say, and then fall off the board, again and again. The standard cry of the MBA who believes that management is a generic function. Is Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly drove Apple into extinction because the board of directors thought that selling Pepsi was good preparation for running a computer company? The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand.
There are a lot of comments in here about how project managers get in the way of good engineering and building a commercial enterprise. I suspect many people only read the first few paragraphs of the article, because this misses the point. Page, like many engineers, wasn't able (yet) to do a lot of what was required to turn good engineering into good business. His instict wasn't right - it was wrong. He eventually realsied that, matured, and returned to the helm of the organisation later.
I've found there's often a quiet but strident feeling shared amongst engieneers that we are smarter than everyone else. This leads to us being very impatient with opinions and worldviews we don't agree with or understand. There is more to relationships and business than being clever and being a great engineer. Some of the comments even go as far as to classify the engineers as value creators and the non-engineers as value extractors! How patronising can you get. If finance, marketing, leadership, sales, etc wasn't needed then they wouldn't get hired. They could hold a similarly unbalanced view that engineers are just paid to build a thing, and that the thing is pointless until they convince others to finance its real development or buy it.
Maybe because its written like a Hollywood Movie Plot!
"It was just five years since Page, then a 22-year-old graduate student at Stanford, was struck in the middle of the night with a vision. In it, he somehow managed to download the entire Web and by examining the links between the pages he saw the world’s information in an entirely new way."
The article is from 2014 and describes events from 2001. That is before the Agile approach became popular for managing software development projects. It is the same year the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was written.
Agile happened because using the standard set of pre-Agile tools was inflexible. Replanning happened way too often, and was way too much work. Or, worse, teams tried to stick to a clearly obsolete schedule. This is not to say that Agile, especially as it has morphed into something that is too often a jargon-laden dogma, it an unalloyed good. But it was a relatively primitive time for software project management.
The article says very little about what responsibilities were organized onder project managers. Was it the wrong approach to project management? Was the job description inappropriate? The wrong tools?
At the risk of fanboys downvoting this, I think world won’t be better place if Jobs went on to be CEO of Google. He would have locked everything down, imagine all of the massive open source just never coming out, Google Brain never existing, all the free products only available on Android and no where else.
NeXT and Apple open sourced more projects under Steve Jobs than they have since. A world where Jobs went for Google CEO is a world where Jobs has a different aesthetic worldview entirely, and you can’t know what would have happened.
Page did make sweeping design / product changes once he was handed the reigns; I suspect, acting on his conversations with Jobs? His "Chief of Product", Sundar Pichai, on hand to execute his vision across Search, Apps, and Ads (and later, on Android as well).
That's what made it kind of an interesting read. All of the 'nicer Larry' projects in the article flopped, from Google+ to wearables to unsupervised learning being useful commercially.
Google's biggest business failing around that era was how far behind they were in cloud computing. GCE only launched in 2013. EC2 launched 2007-ish. In 2014, unless you were paying attention to Amazon, it wasn't obvious how big of a blunder this was, yet.
I think the idea that the project manager of a technical project should be an engineer sounds like a good idea.
In my life I have seen project managers getting played for fools over and over. If the project manager can’t asses if something like a time estimate is reasonable people will take advantage. The cost, the timeline and the deliverables will suffer.
> Worse, she reported, “Engineers say they have been encouraged to build fewer new products and focus on building improvements to existing ones.”
Sounds like a different Google indeed. Most complaints I hear about nowadays are that Google incentivizes shipping new features too much and ignores buggy existing features.
> Later, at Stanford, he’d peppered his adviser, Terry Winograd, with thesis ideas that sounded as far out there as some of Tesla’s later schemes. One idea involved building a superlong rope that would run from the Earth’s surface all the way into orbit, making it cheaper to put objects in space.
Pretty sure Larry Page didn't invent space elevators.
I wouldn't call NeXT a success. They did some really great R&D, lost a ton of money, and basically donated all that work back to Apple. They did great work, but weren't successful as a corporate entity. Pixar, OTOH, was hugely successful on its on terms.
What I'm saying is that Tesla board needs to find an Eric Schmidt/Gwynne Shotwell-like person to replace the technoking as CEO. The technoking is spiraling.
Shotwell seems no better, promoting cross-globe rocket flights by 2028 cheaper than business class plane tickets. Not space tourism, but a real commercial service starting then. It makes no sense.
> Page set up Android as a separate entity, one that was only nominally a part of Google, and allowed Rubin wide latitude to run it without interference from the parent company.
is that part not true, At least initially? I mean, it could have changed over time, but didn't Android have its own repo, and team, and some googlers were complaining about not being part of the whole system?
Is there some established definition of “sex ring”?
Ring:
a group of people drawn together due to a shared interest or goal, especially one involving illegal or unscrupulous activity.
"the police had been investigating the drug ring"
could we maybe be a bit more specific? Is the claim that this was a “prostitution” ring, which would be illegal, though possibly not immoral unless there was coercion? Or was this just a group of people having “sex”, which I believe is still legal in the United States?
I remember a story from my time at Google of Andy Rubin calling in the entire Android team (or maybe leadership+PM), looking at the PMs, and asking, “what do you all do here?”. I also remember that team worked late almost every day and had more than one drinking-themed night (eg. tequila tuesday, whiskey Wednesday, thirsty Thursday)
That sort of leans rather heavily toward the personal-attack side of the spectrum, but I'm still curious what objective reasoning you might have for your statement.
