Arguing Agile

AA205 - Debating Impact vs. Visibility in Product Management

• Brian Orlando • Season 1 • Episode 205

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We're exploring the false dichotomy between being good at your job and being seen as valuable by leadership!

The framework for this conversation was an eye-opening yet brutally honest post about the tactics one product manager claims to use to advance his career without delivering real impact. 

We ask, "is success about making an impact or just being seen as valuable," while we explore the tactics described in the article:

  • Focusing on vision while ignoring execution
  • Using positivity to mask problems
  • Avoiding accountability
  • Dealing with the Inevitable burnout

Whether you're a product manager, leader, or team member, you won't want to miss our conversation around building sustainable career success without sacrificing integrity.

References:

  • Ronald Westrum: A typology of organisational cultures, 2004
  • AA201 - Mastering Stakeholder Communication and Management
  • AA199 - W. Edwards Deming's Profound Knowledge for Transforming Organizations
  • AA195 - Tyranny of Plans & Planning in Software Development
  • AA117 - You Should Do Time-Based Estimates (Article Review)
  • AA87 - Burnt-Out Product Managers
  • AP52 - Taylorism: The Principles of Scientific Management

#ProductManagement #LeadershipCulture #AgileTeams

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this podcast is going to be different than our other podcasts because I did not let you read the post or any of the comments before we started. Yes. And I'm coming in blind. So it was different than our other podcasts. Yeah. Yeah. What's different? Exactly. All right. Hit the music. so today's podcast is a product management focused podcast we have to read this post because it's so cynical and burnt out., like the flavor of burnout is so strong in this one. You have to wonder why they didn't send it back to the kitchen. All right, here we go. It says the title of the post, which was posted about a month ago. Cause again, I let stuff simmer down before we bring it into the podcasts here was my advice on how to be a terrible, but valuable product manager. All right. Interesting. I know you'll be with me on this one. So I don't know how we're going to adapt our format to this, but I figure as I read things, you can sort of figure out how to take his side and then I'll, we'll see what happened. let's read it and figure out who's going to take whose side. Okay. he says one of the cruelest lessons I've learned as a PM is that success comes in two forms and they rarely align. Number one, being a good PM, driving meaningful impact on the business and its KPIs. And number two, being a valuable PM, ensuring leadership sees you as valuable. Yeah, when you say cruelest lesson, at first I heard coolest lesson. It's cruelest. I mean, it's pretty cool. Yeah, I don't know. Okay. So that's interesting. Meaningful impact and ensuring that leadership sees you as valuable. Before I read anything else, let's start the clock on just this category of like, is this a false dichotomy? Hey, listen, you can either be a good meaning impactful, or you can be someone that leadership likes like, and they're, they're not, you can't do both. I'm all in on this., if leadership likes you, it really doesn't matter how good you are. So you're there to stay., that's what you see all the time. People that remain and you're not out. It doesn't matter how good of a person you are in terms of your product management prowess. As long as leadership likes you, you will prevail. And when leadership goes, you probably go with them to their next landing spot. Is there a counterpoint for that? I think the counterpoint for that is this is a false dichotomy to start with. If you have the choice between playing golf with the CEO and actually being good at your job and you can only do one or the other, why are you in the spot where you can only do one or the other? are you making a statement that the PM role is inherently flawed where you're responsible for so much in the business? It's just not possible to be successful at all. Because if that's your point. It's a really good point. But also I have to challenge I think you're doing too much and you have other problems here. it might be a little early in the podcast to say this, but if you are doing that and you find yourself in this situation, keep that as we updated. I think in this scenario what happens is if you're in an organization where. Leadership, CEO, whoever it is, they are only looking to make personal relationships with you. And if you can really kind of hit it off with them it really doesn't matter to them what you do, it's who you are at the end of the day. So you're this person that they like. You're all in the right places with them, right? You play golf with them, You will prevail. you will survive, right? Contrast that with somebody who is not in that social sphere, but is very good at their job. They would have to try so much harder to be noticed that they can make a difference, right?, that's just my take. Again, it's contextual to the organization. Some organizations have other people that will actually notice you and they will talk about you and if that happens great, right? But , I think it's horses with courses really. we did a podcast Where we talked about Westrom's three organization types, I'm trying to remember the name of the podcast. It was Arguing Idol 195, The Tyranny of Plans. We talked about Westrom's . Three types of organizations. Bureaucratic generative, and oh boy, it wasn't psychopathic, it was pathological. Yes. I agree with you. But only from the perspective of, if you're in a pathological organization, then yeah, I mean, this is like, , why are you in a pathological, oh, the fix is not like, how do I represent myself better in a pathological organization? The fix is, why are you still in a pathological organization? Well, I think you're assuming that people in that situation even recognize that they're there, right? And that's the same thing with the relationship metaphor if you know you're there, you can do something about it. Oftentimes, you're just way in there, and don't realize it, He was just trying to survive day in day out. so that was the intro. Wow. That was the longest intro ever. Let's talk about the segment. He says in an ideal world, focusing on number one, me driving impact,. KPIs, whatever should be enough. But in reality, never too often determines your career trajectory, jobs, stability, regardless of actual impact. Yeah, and that's the point I was trying to make in a lot of organizations. It really doesn't matter what you bring to the table. It is what relationships you vectored in with those that matter, right? And they will determine that those relationships will be the determinant of Your survival there or whether you thrive there or not, right? Well, let's see the rest of his evidence in this section he says I spent nine years as a PM across six companies of varying sizes nothing in FAANG most people are not FAANG product managers. So that's normal, right? I have no pedigree. I'm sort of an average Joe. I've been fired. I've quit. I've been laid off. I've held multiple PM jobs at once. That's interesting. Mostly working remotely. The longest I've stayed in one role was five years. Never had trouble finding a job, and there have been no periods of unemployment that weren't voluntary. I used to consider myself a solid PM, but I've become pretty detached from the impact part of the job and experimented the last few years with solely focusing on the appearing valuable part. I typically work 15 through 20 hours per week. My salaries have ranged from 140K to 300K per role. So, non FAANG up in the 300K range, that's pretty out of norm unless I'm out of touch, I guess. It is out of norm, especially if you're doing what he says, which is just playing the part. He's an IC. not a director of product management. Maybe he's a senior product manager or whatever, but again, like the amount of burnout that I'm sensing here so, let's talk about his claim that he's been able to kind of leap jobs every couple years long as he stayed in one place Just five years and a job and and he's mostly remote in all these roles making anywhere between 140 and 300 depending on where you know, what job he's me I although that one that 300 might be one night my book might be the time. He's double dipping That might be what he's talking about Okay. So first of all, I doubt without being able to make an impact. I doubt, well, we don't need to get into the salary ranges, but I doubt what he's saying about the salary range for one job making that much when you're not making an impact, but you never know. He might only stay there. He might've gotten 300 K salary, stay there for four months until you know, they washed them out. So in arguing as a one 99, where we talked about Deming, I think it was one where we talked about Deming. One of the things podcast for the people that are not going to go looking in that podcast, listen to an hour and hour and 50 minutes, whatever podcast is one of the things Deming warned about was this management class that would work there for 18 months, anywhere between six, 18 months, two years at the most, and then kind of wash out because they're not successful. They don't have the skill to be successful in that environment. Maybe they're like this command and control mentality, and they don't understand why squeezing harder is not getting any more productivity out of their assembly line I'm hearing this coming through I keep moving on getting some money from wherever and then going on to the next thing and never like I don't hear any like I need To deal with my burnout like I don't hear any strategies in this granted. It's the intro And he will give some points and strategies later, I take a lot of cynicism in a bad way from this. How can you not? I concur with you right there. So if this is a reality where you can get that by just appearances. Sign me up. Seriously. I will definitely take the other side of this argument if a business is run in a way where, Whatever you do is ambivalent to impact. I don't think I want to work there. Where leadership can't tell between the people that are producing and who are not producing. Forget being data driven just like, there's money. There's bottom line. Like the final thing when you sit down and look at the numbers, there is a bottom line to look at we hired this person, we pay them this much, the product line was producing this much when they started, the product line is producing this much now. Or, or maybe the product line is supporting this many customers now with the same amount of money going, , there are numbers. I guess you could work at a place that doesn't look at the bottom line, doesn't have any kind of KPIs or whatever for impact numbers, doesn't use any kind of OKR system or whatever, like. I don't know about this one. You're not going to make a career at a place like this. this is a hopping point, right? You're going to not last that long here. If you keep doing this and apparently from the intro, it sounds like. That's what's been happening. Let me throw out a cohesive argument for you to push back against. It's not great. I'm gonna preface that It's fine. when we go into the points section, it's gonna be negative 10, 000 points for having a not great argument that I prefaced. I'm gonna be like, Brian, this is the kind of feedback I get at my job. don't preface it to be like, this is not great. Just say what you want to say. Listen, that's good feedback, but also it is a terrible point, and you should know to be ready for a terrible point with a terrible argument. You have me warned. Yeah, you had me at terrible. Sign me on! I only want to hear terrible pitches. I forgot what I was going to say. If you're a product manager, I understand you've moved every two years, 18 months, whatever. you're trying to step function up your maximum earnings or whatever, right? Sure. Cool I'm all about cashing down and burrowing out, as we know. But also like, don't expect to get better at your job. Like getting in quickly like scaling your supporters, making an impact, like all the stuff that you have to do as a PM to be a good, impactful PM, don't expect to get better at that when you're basically saying like, well, nobody cares about that, so I'm not going to care about it. You're going to float from place to place again, just like Demi Warren, you're going to float from place to place, you're never going to be more effective, you're not going to have these great skill sets and like, hopefully the market never evolves to a point where like more is expected from PMs. Because then you have a real difficulty staying in the field. I would argue you're actually not even worried about your career at this stage. All you're doing is just simply moving from job to job. Yeah. You're not going to get better at anything in your craft, right? Because that is what you're sacrificing in order to make a quick buck and then move to the next position leveraging the previous one, right? Yeah. And that's typically what we see quite often, sadly, it's pretty rare where a PM, a park manager stays at a location at a job is really working at improving their craft. I mean, for every one of those, there's several of the other type, sadly, right? That's my observation, at least. But then again, if I can always get a job and only be out of work voluntarily when I need to take a break, I'm great. Why not? Why not keep doing that? Right. So not that I'm actually advocating this, but I'm taking the other side of the arguing agile argument You don't have to necessarily care about your craft. You can just simply move from one place to another. And all you're doing is resume padding based on where you've been and we've seen a lot of that. We're still seeing a lot of that. You still see, even today, people that are doing TED talks that have never actually managed a product in their life. Yeah it's a shame, but you see that, well that's the end of the career implications slash like episode, like fundamentals of, of his dichotomy, that's the end of that segment. I just want to call attention to, I don't know if I'll award a no points. This is like the, I hope both teams had fun category where zero points are awarded to either team. Or a million. I was going to say I docked myself 10, 000, so I guess technically you win. So there we go. All right. So we're going to move on to the next section, which is just talking about, he throws out a lot of tactics in this section that work for him. We're going to read through his tactics and discuss them. That'll be the next section. He gives out tactics. He calls them tips on looking valuable as a PM. So here we go. We've segmented these into a couple of different categories. Category one is going to be communication tactics. You know, I love communication tactics So segment one of his points. Okay. He says, number one, he said, well, he's not number one. He says, stay positive. Always highlight silver linings no matter how bad things are. Don't say anything negative about ideas. People or companies period this is a nod to the fact that you're not a negative nanny You're always gonna say good things no matter what right? Hey, you fell down and you know You fell into mud, but it was clean mud. corporate America has a whole industry on positivity and people running companies eat this stuff up like crazy. And I will say am I defending him now? Is that where I am now? Sorry, I'm defending him now. I'm on his side. wait, do you want to, are you against this? I'm going to argue that what he's doing is the right thing to do. If you give a damn about your job, not your career necessarily. All right. You, you, you, all right. You take this one away then, because I want to argue the other side of this one.. Stay positive. If you're a negative nanny, you will stick out. People will see you as a naysayer. Even if the news is terrible, being a naysayer is a bad thing. Because when the news is bad, and you say, well we're doing pretty badly, this and that. Automatically, as a PM, it comes down on you. So, even if things are really bad, if you stay positive, , this is going to rub off on people around you, a PM is saying they're not so bad. It can't be that bad, right? So, positivity, as he says here, positivity creates psychological safety. Everything's fine, don't worry,, if you're in the survival game, this is a great comps tactic. The way we've organized the notes frames it as positivity. Positivity. create psychological safety. Yeah. I don't believe that's true. I think lots of hard work over a long period of time is what creates psychological safety. I don't think it's , positivity alone, and that's, I'm not even just saying that because I can't say positivity, I think you have to talk about the negatives. I think we really dug into this one, which, which, by the way, deserves its own episode. Positivity, because there's a whole positivity industrial complex. Yes. Of people trying to sell books, I understand what you just said, and I agree with it, but only from the perspective of you've got to know what the field and the sport is like to play within the rules to get ahead. But in reality, if you're running a business, and it's just like you by yourself, solo, you've got to look at declining revenue quarter over quarter for the last five quarters. I have a trend. You know what I mean? You've got to look at the negative news. Yeah. You should, right? You should. If you care about your craft, you should. this person is really looking to get by and quickly gloss over all the negative. He's doing it in a disingenuous way of saying, I'm absolutely never going, nothing negative is ever going to come out of my mouth like, this might be a bad decision or this strategy, might be time to stop because of the evidence, He's just saying, don't say anything. He, well, he's saying that always accentuate the silver lining, right? So yeah, we have reclining revenues, but we have increasing adoption, let's say. I understand, but it doesn't really matter as a metric. He's doing it from a cynical standpoint. He's doing it from a disingenuous standpoint, but what he's saying, again, just, just from cynicism alone, he's just saying. Just don't, let somebody else be the one that brings up the negative news or the negative connotation or whatever. Don't be the one that, that, that, that even, it doesn't even come out of your mouth ever. He's saying that and probably also downplay negativity. Anytime there's negativity, downplay it, right? It's not so bad, you know? But he's only doing this to win friends. exactly. because that guarantees his longevity. Yep. So like that, that's the end of, that's the end stay positive okay, I agree with you. Om likes 10 million points to Om. He wins this category, but also with a star next to it as soon as you start doing this to get ahead, or as soon as you have an ulterior motive, not to. Question negative things you lose a million points you're back to zero In fact, you might even be at negative million points The next category he says is Focus on vision and ignore execution. I love this one. I want to talk about this one all day. I want to clear my calendar. Siri, set a reminder and clear my calendar. Incremental improvements grow a business, but don't grow your profile. Talk 90 percent about the uncertain future and only 10 percent about the present. I think this goes hand in glove with the previous one, which is ignore any negativity. Right? So so don't, negativity lives in the present. You can't say, oh, we're going to have some problems in the future. That doesn't happen. So negativity is in the present. And if you're only limiting your discussion about the present at 10%, it's just all, we have a rosy future ahead. And that's what this is. So people do that, and they do that using ancillary. Data, nothing to do with your company, nothing to do with product discovery. Exactly. And it's almost an art form. I've seen people do this in my career. Let me tell you, they excel at it. Remember the old days where sales would come in the room and talk about that pipeline. We got this pipeline. We got a deep pipeline. We got all these customers and we got these things going on. We got this pipeline and you're like, man, let me see a pressure valve on that pipeline., there's like a trickle coming through on the other end. As far as money comes out of that pipeline, I don't see any money. You see, the way you describe it, there's . All kinds of pressure and money coming through that pipeline. We should be drowning in money right now. This is the old sales It's in the pipeline This is why this one focus on the vision ignore execution. this one has been manifest for me like why I'm arguing against this one is because all through my career, the least effective salespeople that I have ever seen do this. They focus on a potential future that doesn't exist. this is like Enron and a bunch of other companies that people went to jail about they focus on a future that doesn't exist. To try to sell you something today. This is also every fad, like Oh, you've got to get on board with everything AI, everything crypto, everything blockchain, they're trying to sell you everything because they're trying to sell you on a future. Whereas if you look at today, it's nothing. Well, some lady named Elizabeth is twitching now of Theranos. Oh boy. Listen, I agree with you, but I'm taking the other side. So here's what I'm going to say to you, right? It doesn't matter people buy into your vision if you're a visionary person You can talk about the vision all day long. Okay, right and people will say but today That's just temporary. That's today. But look at where we're going. The future is bright. Come with me. These are the kinds of people that, what's his name, Jim? What's his name to the island over there? And they all died. Seriously, I want to tell you. These people are gifted. They are. I thought you meant Lou Gershner. That's right. You were like Jim. I work for the guy. I can't say that. No. What was his name? The guy. I know you're talking about. I can't, I can't remember. Everybody took poison and died., they convinced you of a rosy future ahead. And you talk about the 10 percent today and they're like, this too shall pass. Don't worry about it. It's fine. And for that reason, this is contagious, that kind of mentality is contagious. leadership will look at that and say, he's a visionary. You get labeled that way. You're a visionary, you're a strategist, and you will survive in the company. You're not an executioner, right? You're not doing stuff today. You know, the funny thing about this is I've seen people like you're describing. Make the case to hire somebody and have somebody rolled under them to be like, Oh, I need to be the product manager. And the problem is you need to hire a product owner for me and I'll tell them what to do. That's the problem., I've seen that a lot. I've seen that more than one time. And it is a problem., that is an industry problem that hasn't gone away. And like, I would like to say that there's a bright future at the end of this tunnel. But actually it's a train Coming the other way. And like, it's a problem.'cause it's in the training complex. It's everywhere. Well, I'm gonna award negative points to both of us. We both lose, I agree. We both lose this category.'cause when the train started coming. Nobody can move out of the way and it wasn't fun. All right, so his next one is speak in big picture terms. Very similar to the previous category. He says constantly reference high level priorities and a cohesive product vision push back on tasks that require effort by questioning alignment with the long term strategy. These people talk about PowerPoint slides and vision statements. Instead of what is happening today, right? What is happening today may be negative, but they, infer that that's not their issue. That's because of something else. Or, that's someone else's problem. It's operations. It's this, it's that. But this is where we're heading, right?, they paint a rosy picture and say, this is our strategy, we're going to have 15 percent year on year growth, et cetera, They don't say how, because They have no idea, They have no idea. But, they will say, smart people will do this. They will say, last year, we had 5 percent growth. And they will leverage that and say, because of the things that we're putting in place today. It will serve us well towards getting a 15 percent growth in the next year. That's what they will say, but there's no substance under that. You know what I love about this category is if you question it, we're like, Oh, you're just being negative. you're a troublemaker. You're a negative Nancy. you're just troublemaking. Like we don't need that kind of negativity. That's right. this person proposing all this stuff, like they have no concept of tactics. I would also say they're not talking to people doing the work that usually people like this are trying to build a wall between. Their world, and the people actually doing the work because the people actually doing the work can make these people look bad real quick, all day. and in fact. I've been at more than one workplace where I'll come in behind people like this that have failed. For a period of time where leadership doesn't believe that it's even possible to succeed anymore come in with small team, small budget, do laps around folks like this and their giant program level teams . Be like, look, it's easy. You talk directly to people. You don't need to insulate yourself in the bubble . Yeah, it feels good, doesn't it? Yeah, exactly. I agree with you there, these people do this for a reason, ? They do this because they have no substance. So, this is like a survival mechanism for them. Yeah, I mean, okay, understood. Again, going back to the Deming podcast at what point in your career do you get tired of being ineffective and just decide like, I'm just gonna go be a farmer or whatever that's a good question because you know, when you look at our industry today, right? You're going to find people that have never actually done product management before. But they've been product manager, product director, VP of product even the higher you climb, I think the more of those people you will find. Yeah, exactly, the other thing that happens though, with this is people like this attract people like themselves., they run in cliques. I'll never forget the time when I was an entrepreneur and ran an ice cream franchise a 21-year-old out of college was made a VP of product, He visited New England in the middle of winter., he frowned at the coffee flash. We're an ice cream franchise. What are you doing with coffee nobody wants ice cream at 8 o'clock in the morning. People are going to work. We're in a mall. People want coffee. I'm doing what it takes to survive. They don't know. So it's bookwork sometimes but in other cases, it's basically just simply hoodwinking their way around companies and farming their resume, from one job to another. We've seen that I think you take all the points for a real world story with a 20 something year old VP So the last one in this first category, the communication tactics, is exude. Confidence. He says, exude confidence, not uncertainty. If leadership asks for an 18 month roadmap, don't hedge. Give them one. If asked for an impact estimate, provide a number, not a range. Doubt is a career killer. So in arguing agile 117, you should do time based estimates, we reviewed an article where the article said you should just do time based estimates, it was ArsTechnica article or, oh, Forbes as well? Okay, yeah. Oh, geez, man, like we're double, triple, yeah. One 17, we reviewed an article that said, just give estimates. everyone will look more positively on you when you give estimates in hours. And he's basically saying the same thing. He's like, Hey, they want a roadmap with like in X number of weeks, we'll deliver this. basically a Gantt chart. Just give them one, just give them one. Hey, the timelines change. Go back home and be like, Hey, timeline's changed. Cool. Well, one of the biggest lessons I learned early in my career is to not give a point estimate and just give a range. But he's saying the opposite now. And that goes to the position you're in, right? You're now a big shot PM. So you can get away with not giving vague ranges because ranges are seen as hedging and ambiguous uncertainty. Yeah. So he's saying, well, just pick a date. And go with it. And if it changes, you say, well, hey, look, life happens., if I'm going to agree with this. It's from a perspective of, that's what leadership does. They pick a date and they're like, this is how leadership picks dates, by the way. They will say, I don't want to pick a date to make the team scramble and drop what they're doing. But I don't want to make it look like I'm taking my foot off the pedal. I want to keep the pressure on, so I'm going to pick a date. we're recording this is like mid month. It's like the 14th right now I want to pick a date end of month. We need to have this. Just keep the pressure on. That's how leadership sets dates. First of all, they're arbitrary. But they're trying to say like, hey, it's a priority, but it's not super high priority. So don't drop what you're doing, but also it's that kind of thing. Yeah, so coming back to this point here, what he's saying is if you have any kind of uncertainty in your estimates, you look weak. So what you should do is just say, here's what it is. I'm telling you, we're going to make this happen, We're going to try our best to make this happen. If it doesn't happen, it will be for reasons outside of our control. So that's it, right? Just go with it. There may not be any substance behind your estimate. And that is the part that worries me. But I'm taking the other side, of course. So I'm saying, hey, listen, if you're one of those PMs, go for it. Pick a date. Pick a date. You can't fail. Because you simply say, well, it was the dev teams that didn't come through. Right. They need more time or whatever. Oh, , does this lend itself to the blame game? Is that what's happening now?, for the purpose of the rest of this conversation, I will cede my time to the representative from Tampa, Florida. I won't even engage to say I'm right or wrong with it. I'll cede all my points to you for the rest of this category set a date. Say whatever you want. You're not even planning it. Fine. No problem. My guarantee always is we will go live on a day that ends in a Y. That's right. We can't fail. the dates aren't real. They're all made up. Everyone's making up dates anyway. And everyone's missing them. why not just make up points like the rest of the gang when, at the end of the episode, when they pull off the Scooby Doo mask, your dates are as wrong as everyone else's. but if I'm giving an exact date. Confidently My leadership is looking at me thinking this guy knows what he's doing. Yeah. And that's all that matters.. All right. Well, let's move on to the next. So, again, I cede all the points to you for this category because I think it's ridiculous and I don't want to engage with it. Let's move on to the next category which is workload management. We're on the managing the workload of the day to day at this point. And in the posts, he says signal busyness, occasionally mentioned how slammed you are. Drop a weekend Slack message on Sunday night about how you solved some problem and how it's great to have some quiet time to work on things. Set a scheduled message to go off on a Sunday night. I mean, he's basically saying you want to make your work visible in a remote slash distributed environment and then and then you're Performance theater distracts from everything else. Oh, look at, look at, look at Brian. He works every 24 seven. He's so busy. But this is like anybody who knows real product management knows like, Hey man, like you, you shouldn't like 24 seven. That's not, that's not sustainable. Also what customers are you collaborating with on a Sunday night? Like yeah. I mean, this is just, It's like you said, it's pure theater, and it works because people that are looking at you leadership mainly, ? Right. They look at that and go, oh, this guy is really working hard, , I didn't expect myself to be on this side of the table, but if I'm going to defend his point for a minute, when you were the first product management hire, I'm looking at you, Tricia, we haven't done that podcast. We will come to Orlando and do that podcast. We'll figure it out. When you're the first product management hire and you're working for all founders, they want to feel this category. in, that case, I am with him on that just kind of like. Point out when you're working outside of normal operational hours. Like at the point where you're the first product management hire, you're probably working with a startup and their hours are a little wacky. They're not going to give you a special star for that. Everyone's expected to do that in a startup, right? Like I'm talking to startup like 10 people or less. You're not like, Oh, we're 300 people. We're a startup. You're not a startup. But if you want to break through into that crowd, they need to visibly see you working when they're working, the terrible point that I can offer for this in support of his point is if they send you a Slack message or something and it's a weekend. They might tell you, Hey, we know it's weekend. We know it's outside of work hours., don't feel beholden to respond, but they're expecting that you're going to be right there in real time communication. So if you're working for these people, first of all, you have to know who you're working for. If you're working for workaholics that can't wait to get back in the office because they hate their wife and kids. then yes. I'm with him. If I'm gonna defend him at all, I will defend him on those grounds Boy, I'm super sassy today when we're back to the other side of it. Oh, please. Not, not the other side, but, but a slightly different side of it. Okay. Signaling business and the way he's saying it occasionally. Let people know you're all so busy. Yeah, you're so busy. So, there are many ways to do this, right?, you'll see this behavior, right? Anyone who's been around a bit, they've seen it. People will say, I'm so busy. Well put something on my calendar. And you can't find time on their calendar because they've blocked their own calendar.. There are different ways of doing this, right? So, you do that. And then the other thing is, you do have an empty slot that somebody happens to snag. And you say, listen, I'm sorry. Somebody just booked that, and it's leadership, so I can't meet with you. All of these are just signals that say, I'm so busy to deal with you. I can't even talk to you. What he's saying is signaling busyness. That, that again, is that person who wants to simply show how busy they are. They have many ways to do this, including some of the ones you mentioned. schedule a Slack message to go off on the weekend., hey, I just had a breakthrough after three hours on a Sunday morning. and I haven't even had my first coffee. But, the only people that give a damn about this stuff are Your leadership, who is coveting this kind of behavior, Nobody else cares, honestly. So if you want to create a career out of things, and you have other PMs there, they're going to look at you and say, to themselves at least, you don't know how to manage your time, right? Whereas other people on the other side they're going to covet this. They're going to say, this person works very hard. You could even make a request to have an FTE. join your team, right? I'm so busy. I need somebody to help me and you probably will.. That's right. It's feigning productivity. That's exactly right. I'm going to award 25 scooby points for this one because . This is so normal in corporate America And you might sweep the category with that one cuz I like I mean my my points with this Is like you need leadership to Understand that busyness is not productivity. those concepts are divorced from one another., with the books podcasts and Forbes articles that leadership reads on a normal basis, I just don't know if they're getting that level of education. I mean, I mean, those crayons are tasty, but they're not, they're not leading to insight. Anyway, prioritizing customer meetings the bigger the customer, the better. Take every customer meeting you possibly can make yourself and your company synonymous in their eyes. I'm going to have a hard time pushing back against this one because the more that you're meeting with customers, the more valuable you are to the company. I have gone on record saying that on previous podcasts, so many, in fact, that I am not even bothering trying to look back. In our archive to find where I've said that. the other side of the argument here, Brian, is this, You are the company to the customer. So you're always going to take every call. The difference is if you're a PM a career PM, You're going to actually empathize with your customers. You're not going to sit there and have coffee with them, right? That's not, you're not just there for show. And some of these people on the other side of the equation, that's what they do. They say to the customer, look any problem you have, you contact me. And the minute the customer contacts that person, they're simply going to get deflected onto somebody else. Yeah. Pass through, pass back. Exactly. So yeah, I mean, if you genuinely care about your customers. The point that you've been making on previous podcasts, great. I agree with that wholeheartedly. You really need to do that, and not just PMs, by the way, right? Everybody does people in support, anybody, but these guys, they're only doing it so that the customer sees them as the company, and there's almost like a vested interest on their part, right? So when leadership hear about. Their name from the customer. It's always like these persons, these people are always in the meetings. They care about us. The reality might be slightly different. It's disingenuous. Exactly. That word keeps coming back up. Is it because this is like where we talk about say do ratios I know the podcast. This is the kind of thing like you can be on all the customer calls you want and Committing to helping out with problems, but if nobody's tracking like, Hey, are you actually making an impact for these customers? Yeah, I mean, which, is hard because you making an impact and your team making an impact might be one in the same as far as stats go. Because again,, if you're really a cross functional team where you're supposed to be working together, but you're almost dealing with that in a predatory manner it's super easy to hide in this category of like, Oh, the customer knows my name. Yeah. Yeah ah, man, this was, this was, this is like, I don't it's, it's, it's negative 15 points for me not making a cohesive. Push against the predatory nature of this and plus 15 points for you. Man, this, this one's a tough one. The people that have established the ability to insert themselves in the middle of the communication channel, between the people doing the work. And the people that need the work done, , you've just rolled the clocks back to, before the agile manifesto at that point, you say, no, no, no. The customer talks to me and tells me all their problems and they don't tell anyone else their problems. And then I might pass those problems along. Well, you're a gatekeeper at that point. You're doing that to ensure that you still have a job. Exactly. So I think some of this touches on. Taylorism people doing the work don't really know, right. And in management, I know, so I'm going to be the person who's front and center with the customer. And I'll just pass the message back down to people doing the work. First of all, , I went back and listened to our Taylorism, arguing agile, like 52 or whatever, . I went back and listened to that recently. And I don't know if that is Taylorism. I think that's just somebody being predatory. It's like somebody being a bad actor because , in Taylorism, we brought somebody in to study the work do real, dive into the business, understand how things work, work with the workers, this is not that. this is somebody just inserting themselves in between processes where they're basically not needed. Control. It is definitely just that. Controlling, yes. That's a big part of what management did in Taylorism anyway. we can agree on that one. Oh, well, I feel you were the first one to mention Taylorism, so you lose all your points in this category. That's the way it works in this podcast. You mentioned Taylorism first, you lose. I mean, at the point you mentioned Taylorism the category is over I mean, we're not done with the podcast Which is fortunate because that could be the rule on the new arguing as a podcast like you mentioned Taylorism podcast is over immediately Yikes. Yikes. his next point is Succinct . He says, avoid engineering's day to day. There's no upside in the weeds. Praise them, but stay out of their decisions. Oh, I just pulled the pin and walked out of the room. Sure did. Oh my God., how many times have we seen this, right? people in the room have no idea which way is up. However, golf swing guy, golf swing guy, exactly. Golf swing guy. So they're going to say, well, listen, I know this is really complicated, but I have every confidence in you, my tech team. That's right. And the tech team sitting there going, this is easy. We could have done this by now. We've been talking about it for two minutes so this is very prevalent. When you see it in practice, it kind of almost gives you the heebie jeebies right? So people are, people are praising the technical people by over inflating the complexity of the work that needs to be done sometimes. Sometimes not, but most times they are doing that. They're saying this is very complicated, but we have a very smart team. We know we can take care of you, Mr. Customer, right? If you have a savvy customer who's technical as well, they get that, and they're like, Okay, it's just lip service at that point. So, that person loses points, in the eyes of the customer, but they're not going to say anything. The customer's not going to say anything, right? If The product manager also has leadership in the room at the time. Leadership's going to look at the product manager and they're doing a great job, right? Because they are praising the people doing the work. This is great., There's a lot of phony attaboy sentiment in here. So I don't know about this. Avoiding engineering day to day. The best product managers will bring the technical team in and say, , what do you think?? And listen to them and not push back and, and placate them. Sometimes people do that too. They'll just say, you're, you're very smart. You can have this knocked down in a day, right? Sure. And teams don't push back. They're like, it's really not a day's worth of work, but how do we push back? You know, as a product manager. I think I've seen both of those scenarios before. This is a great category. again, this is another one to lightly push back you obviously have taken the position of this is a ridiculous point if I'm going to try to defend him I will defend him by saying the people that make decisions on behalf of the business can be the person that everybody in the whole business points to like, they made that decision, right? To be under the gun like that. There's no point to be this, this is the product manager who doesn't go to refinements. Who just says this is the top priority, you guys figure it out, okay? The majority of my time is spent figuring out like, why we're doing it. I'm gonna tell you the why. This is the business context of why we're doing this. And then how you get it done, I don't care. But then I feel like , the why and the how being pulled apart. For the purpose of this conversation,, that why and how there's a level that why and how get pulled apart at, and this person is pulling the why and the how apart at a very high level. Oh, listen, not only that, there's the third question in there, the what. So the team's sitting there going, what are we supposed to be doing? Yeah, you've told us why we're doing this, right? It's going to save this client millions or whatever it is, therefore it's a good thing. Yeah. I think you're right., if we're going to take the cynicism out of what he's saying, the product manager subbing in for business leadership, I'm coming in to give you the why, and then I'm leaving the what to you, You're right. I should be. Participating actively, an active voice in the what? Yes. You are correct. You should be an active voice in the what? Especially when I have multiple dev teams, or if you use some of these completely wacky frameworks, like less, where one product manager is like 30 teams or whatever, Mike Miller, back me up in the comments. You're in there to be like, Hey, this is the business, I don't have time to explain to every single dev team servicing this function. I got to go if you're in a framework like that, or when you're trying to launch a release train and you've got many teams I just don't have time to explain to every single team. I'm gonna give you the why. You should be smart enough to extrapolate the what. if you get your what wrong, come back to me with that specific single thing. I'll set you straight, and then I'll bounce out and go play golf. Listen, I got golf games to get to, Om. Listen, so a lot of times what happens is The PMs will leave the watts and even, even the Ys to their product owners. They'll just say, here's a customer, they need to do this. That's it. Real high level. And unfortunately, the teams aren't getting their value out of that conversation at that point in time. So unless that is decoded for them, they're going to be in trouble. Some places they use delivery managers whose job it is to relay to the team and reinforce not only the what, the why, right? And then say, okay, team, tell me the how. You tell me. And then we'll figure out how we can actually make the delivery to the customer. These delivery managers are earning their keep, right? These are the guys that are doing it right. And they are project managers that are simply looking for dates, but they're doing a function of product management. I'm about to just seed all my points just to move on because of how scared of this category. And because we can do a whole podcast on just this category your quote, business people, some people lump product managers in with the business people rather than like. They're not the tech people, or the business people, or the leadership people, They own the whole thing end to end. They're responsible end to end. So you don't get to be like, I'm responsible but I don't want to talk to the dev teams. I don't want to talk to customer service. I don't want to talk directly to customers. When you're a leader, you don't get to push off different accountability rests with you, the buck stops with you and also the points stop with you. So there we go. Points are over. We're not awarding points because the buck has already stopped. All right. So he says the next category under workload management is Don't overstep if engineering UX or marketing makes a bad call Let them own it if asked for a decision defer back to them This is a classic non committal situation here, right? So this is like neo in the matrix where he's dodging all the bullets He's letting them hit all his developers and UX people. Okay. First of all, I'm going to take all the points from the category and I win immediately. All right. It's blame shifting. I don't like it. So his next category is, sorry, his next category is seek low effort, high visibility wins. Organize fantasy football leagues, facilitate post it brainstorming sessions, or run Friday show and tells. Yeah, the illusion of progress is real with these people, right?, something that they can show and tell, something that they can invite their leadership people to. That's really what they're going for here. Nothing real. It's not like a product review or anything like that here, hackathons, promote those. distract the team in those things And then invite your leadership and say, look at how our teams are doing. fantastic. So innovative. I don't know if I agree. he's claiming these things are trivial I don't agree with his claim that these things are trivial or filler or whatever. I think these things are like culture building activities and quite honestly, how dare you co-opt. These culture building activities under the guise of being cynical and burnt out these are things that bring teams together. That is true. I agree with that. However, coming from this PM as illusion of progress, they're simply using these. to say, look at what I'm doing here with my team. Well, he's saying, he's saying, well, he's saying, I'm going to like, I'm not going to do the PM job. I'm going to do this other alternate stream of work of building culture connecting teams and doing team building he's building culture. He's going to do these other culture building things as a avenue to distract people. From the fact that I'm a bad PM or burnt out PM. Actually, actually, that's what that's what he really is these activities in and of themselves do have value they do have value and there's no reason that our PM who's also making impact Can't also do these things. All right, let's move on to the third and final category, which is accountability practices. Okay. So he outlines a few things for, accountability, let's talk about this. Number one, podcast, never own failure. If a product or feature flops, don't walk it back. Just kick it down the road, identify some hypothetical point in the future where it could be successful, and get everyone on board with it. I feel like I just flipped a table. You did, you did. Listen, never own failure. Never own failure. For all the listeners Om is pointing at everyone else in the room except himself. These PMS that Basically do not own failure are really tooting their own horn, even in failure, saying, I told you, if you'd listen to me, right, these are the people that are so dangerous because now the teams are going, well, We told you that we shouldn't be doing these things, but you insisted we have to do them. So we did them and now we failed and now it's not your fault, but ours, how does that work? So I've seen this, I've seen this before and these, I've actually, believe it or not, in the scenario of a failure, I have seen the point people, RPM in this case, get promoted in light of the failure because they are very good at deflecting and along with that, I'll give you all my points. I will accept them. And as far as my acceptance speech goes, here we go. First I'd like to thank all of the leadership who don't track metrics and could care less to look into metrics. The second person I'd like to thank is my developers. Who will stand by for this and not grab torches and pitchforks and burn it all down and be like, listen, if you're not going to pass any of this responsibility or thanks or gratuity, through to us, we're not going to go out on a limb anymore and be up in the middle of the night supporting the system for you. The problem with this one, like never owning the failure is the people that you're blaming at some point. Are gonna come in the middle of the night and it's not gonna be a pleasant experience when they do They're gonna storm castle frankenstein in the middle of the night during a lightning storm Yeah, it's not a good time to be out on the road, but they're gonna do it That's how dedicated they are sadly a lot of them are offshored and the ones that are not really care for their visas Well, luckily that's we put all our money offshore so that we can just get rid of those people The moment they're not completely positive. That was a callback to early in the podcast because I have all the points so it doesn't matter making a cohesive argument. So anyway, we're going to move on to the next point in the accountability category, he says, treat your backlog as the baseline reality. I'm not quite sure what this even means, but I'm going to keep reading. Let's read. Don't stress it and don't justify it. Just take an afternoon, put everything in whatever order you choose. If stakeholders disagree, put the ball in their court to provide compelling reasons to change it so I guess he's saying . Decisiveness creates clarity because you've taken the authoritative step to decide what the prioritization is Build clarity the contention of prioritization is in and of itself Anathema to getting ahead. It's a very confusing claim. That is the claim, but also the fact that who's to blame here, if you like for lack of progress and getting ahead is the customer because he's putting that in the court from what I see here earlier. If you go back, this is it. The stakeholders disagree, put the ball in their court to provide compelling reasons to change it. So you say, well, this is the backlog. If you don't see it this way, convince me otherwise. No. I don't even know where to start with this one. So again, staying on the side that I've been the whole time, I would say, if you're one of these people, all you're doing is trying to obfuscate, You're just simply saying, look, ignore the man behind the curtain, This is our backlog. You like this? No. Shuffle the cards again. You like this? Why do you not like this? This is what we're doing now. You weren't doing that a second ago, but That's not the point. So you're blaming the customer for your lack of progress. this is absolutely terrible. Again, if you're one of these PMs, don't talk to me. So, we did Arguing Agile 201, which was Stakeholder Communication. We did that podcast where you're talking about breaking up the people that you talk to as a product manager, basically your audience. And you listen to the whole thing because the output of that podcast was very tactical you can write these notes down, put them on the side of your monitor and say, when I'm interfacing with these people, I need to take this outlook on interfacing with other people. Anyway, look at that one for this category. If you're even a great takeaway, regardless. I can't even bring myself to a line when we're talking about now. I think I'm not even going to bother making a case because it sounds, this sounds, this is as ludicrous as it sounds. Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. So listen, listen to that. Listen to arguing agile. 2, 2 0 1. Yeah. 2 0 1. Mastering stakeholder Communication and Management. That was arguing as well. 2 0 1. Listen to that one and go forward with that to say when you reprioritize some item in your backlog or an epic,, that should be an indicator to blast out. To the crowd which was one of our audiences in that podcast to blast out like, Hey, I've reprioritized, I have some reasoning because like when you're, when you get to a a certain level of advancement in your product management , leadership will start asking questions like, Hey, how come you prioritize this Over this, Okay, this over that. And then you'll have to answer those questions. But it's better to do that proactively. Absolutely. it's better to bring those voices into the conversation when you're deciding the priorities. for everyone else You're kind of just communicating out like hey, we decided this over this and because of that this is our next step just like a mass information blast type of outlook. Listen to that podcast we were very In the weeds tactical on that podcast. It wasn't high level strategic. It was in the weeds tactical. You can come up with a couple stickies, put them on the side of your monitor, help you through your work day. I'm just happy to win a category at this point in the podcast. the next thing before we move to the end of this podcast. He says find quote resets. Eventually this attitude is going to catch up to you. So yeah, of course, treating your backlogs, the base reality, not owning failure, all the things we've talked about, it's going to catch up to you. We even started the podcast saying it's going to catch up to you. the Deming thing of like, you're going to get caught. Okay. if you move every 18 months, two years, maybe you won't get caught. Because you'll move on before this traffic jam you know what I mean, He says eventually this attitude is going to catch up with you find opportunities to press Reset on all the promises made in the future that you spawn new leadership a changing boss new technology He puts in quotes AI. I like it a new key hire or new promotion These are moments that let you keep up the charade, or as Captain Picard would say, the charade, the charade. Yeah, , this is so typical, right? We've seen this as well, where people, whenever you've seen a person come up and say, because of X. , instead of owning the failure, right, or owning the, the lack of progress, let's just be kind to them. You've seen this before, so there are so many, and some of these ones that he's highlighted here, very valid, new leadership. Leadership changes every three years on average, right, new boss. A new technology. There's always new technology. So you can always blame that. We're adapting to new technology or whatever, right? New key hire, right? We have somebody coming in. They're changing the way we're doing business, it's just finding excuses for your lack of progress or your failures. But you're not presenting them in that way. You're simply saying It's because of those reasons that you're not making the progress that you had hoped to make. It's an art how you communicate that out. If you're one of those PMs that do that, good luck to you. I will call you out if I'm in the room. any effective member of leadership, especially senior leadership, Is going to call you out By the time leadership catches onto this and starts calling him out for this kind of stuff, he's already in the interview process. to move on. So this one's too slimy for me to give points because they won't stick to the category. Let's move on to try to move to the end of this podcast. He says I'm no longer losing my sanity trying to make a product successful or trying to single handedly build a productive product culture. I've got an amazing work life balance. Professionally, I'm completely dead inside. He says he's dead inside I think he's just burnt out this just sounds like being burnt out and been working in too many Pathological organizations. Okay, like I went through this I went through this in my career as product manager where I work with companies and I Started realizing that in the Startup stage I'm talking like sub 30 employees that's my sweet spot I'm really invigorated by working with people that are trying to crack a Problem not like 20 problems or like hello Brian, no matter how hard you work You're always gonna be behind like that. Number one and number two avoiding private equity being held by other companies or being a subcompany of a larger company or whatever, they're just gonna crush you with work. Sure. Because they, they have this like more with less. What was the nineties? What was the saying in the nineties of like do more with less, more with, yeah, do more with less. we don't talk about that anymore in the modern era, that was a thing in the nineties and early 2000s, do more with less. Yeah, of course. Like if you're being crushed with that sure. Like if you're, if you're going to say that you're just burnt out because you feel like you can't make a difference because you keep bouncing back and forth you gotta get over that. you gotta heal yourself so you can be a better partner. To leadership and your development teams and your peers, if you have other product managers, This is so painful to read this article. It's painful for people that are going through this to experience, right? Yeah, it really is. if you're in an organization where you don't have support, it can be very difficult, right? Right. So again, going back to some of the sage advice we give on this podcast, keep that resume updated, but if you are suffering because of this, You got to make a decision, right? Life is too short. You don't want to do this for any period of time that , is going to keep carving away at your inner psyche. Decide if you want to stay in there. Is it worth salvageable? Talk to somebody, right? So this is where those relationships with your leadership come into play. Talk to somebody in leadership and say, look, this is how I feel, right? And go in there with some suggestions. Don't just go in there. Complaining but going there with a couple of suggestions. Here's how I feel. Here's how I think things could be better, and see if you get support if you don't then by all means be ready to move on. Because like I said, it's just not worth it. It's not worth it for you. It's not worth it for your family. I wonder how connected to his local community of product management. I wonder how connected he is. Yeah. You know what I mean? Cause like we both go to a lot of community events like product management and otherwise like developer events, product management events, agile events, that kind of stuff. And I wonder how connected he is because I would go out on a limb to say, I doubt he's connected to any of those markets at all. Because there are people in those markets that will say Hey, Brian, you sound kind of burnt out., why are you taking two jobs? Doing product management when you don't even really get enjoyment out of one what do you really enjoy about your workplace? Exactly. And also does this say something about hiring practices too? Because people hire this individual and don't get any kind of like, I was going to say smell, that's not professional. The professional version of smell. They don't get any detection at all. That this is a completely burnt out. Individual you've got to be completely burnt out to write an article like this. I'm talking like hollowed to the core like toast on three settings on my toaster burnt out. No, I think you're right that people in this situation probably are not partaking in community events and connecting with people that can help them, So, yeah, that's one. as far as to your point about how do you get multiple engagements like this? Maybe they interview well, right? Some people do interview very, very well. So, you can't tell.. There's no sniff test, Early signs will indicate how things are going, and if an individual is burnt out, you'll be able to tell., you've gotta be looking for it, This was a wild one for me to be honest, because the signs are all there in the first . paragraph of the article they're burnt out, you know? And again, we did a podcast on burnout. It was early. I remember. 87. Oh yeah, we didn't Seven. It was early. Arguing Agile. 87. I mean, it was very early for us., we did a . 41 minute and four second podcast on burnt out product managers. And like the nice thing here is you can see the chapter headers of Hey, you're building there. Maybe you're burnt out because you feel the work is meaningless. Maybe you're burnt out because you're in a blame game culture. Maybe you're burnt out because. You know, you don't have a strategy in your cultures eating it for lunch or whatever, like there's, there's, there are quite a few reasons why you're being burnt out, but this stuff sabotages, it's like a, Mobius loop of sabotaging you and making you more burnt out and, less effective. Like the community helps you. It absolutely does. Listen, it's just a low barrier to entry, right? Go out and engage in your community. It's free. Exactly. And you'll learn as much as you're teaching others to, right? So I think it's a great, great idea for everybody to do this. Yeah. And if you're burnt out, one way to counteract that would be Talk to your community, talk to the people trying to break into the field, and then figure out a way to bring them up to speed. Because, if nothing else helps, their enthusiasm will help. Like, reinvigorate whatever was it that got you into the field in the first place. That's right, exactly. Yeah, I agree. Otherwise stop posting reddit it hurts my brain, I'm pretty sure Om got 10 bajillion dinosaur points on this one, and I got hit with a meteor. You got quite a few as well. Both of us are gonna cash out our points. So I'm going to cash out and bro down wrap us up while I do that. All right. Well, listen, thank you for staying with us for this amazing topic that we really didn't plan for at all. Let us know down below in the comments, if there's anything you'd like us to talk about!