Arguing Agile

AA228 - Product Management: The Impossible Job - Is the PM role fundamentally broken?

• Brian Orlando • Season 1 • Episode 228

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Is Product Management the most unrealistic job description ever created? 

Product Managers are supposed to be the "CEO of the product" - a one-person army who is CEO, therapist, engineer, and strategist (all without equity or authority). The only issue is that it sounds terrible and is a modern recipe for failure.

Watch as Brian and Om dive deep into the impossible expectations placed on Product Managers. Listen as we talk through how the role expects you to work 60+ hours minimum, handle everything from technical architecture to customer support, and somehow maintain strategic vision while putting out daily fires. 

The reality? 

Most PMs have responsibility without authority and get paid for one job while doing five. We explore the industrial complex that perpetuates these unrealistic expectations and discuss what needs to change. 

🔥 Key Discussions Include:

  • The myth of "CEO of the product" 
  • Sensationalizing the 60-hour work week
  • Exploitation (aka. human Swiss Army knife)
  • Power dynamics in modern Business
  • $$$ (industrial complex) perpetuating the status quo

Whether you're a PM drowning in responsibilities or a leader wondering why your PM "doesn't communicate enough," this episode will give you plenty to think about. 

#productmanagement  #Leadership #AgileCoaching #WorkLifeBalance #ProductStrategy #TeamDevelopment #OrganizationalDesign

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INTRO MUSIC
Toronto Is My Beat
By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)
CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)

what if I told you that there's a job where you can be expected to be the CEO without equity, the therapist, without training and the engineer without coding time or skills and the strategist, but without authority, all while working 60 hours a week minimum. Cool. Sign me up. Well, that job is product management. Andy Dufrane got his rock hammer. that job is product management. And it's a job description, like it was generated by AI that was exclusively trained on motivational posters. I that it wasn't very good. I do have to say I wrote down like, I have a dozen, and I was like, no. Oh, these all suck. Oh my God. Let me treat you to some of the other ones that also are terrible. Product management. The job description where it looks like someone threw a bunch of MBA textbooks into a blender and hit puree. Nice. I like that. Is that one better or worse than that? That sounds better. A lot of people are drinking that Kool-Aid. So... product management it was a job description that was written by someone who their only work experience was playing the Sims on easy mode in the late nineties. Ooh, I like that one. That was a good one. That's one. Much better. So today we're asking if the product manager role is fundamentally broken or if you need a strong generalist that has a lot of experience in a lot of different areas and also is willing to work 60 hours. I think the fad is everyone has to be a specialist. We need a generalist that's solidly grounded with their experience and it keeps going back and forth, I guess. I'm your host product manager, Brian Orlando. This is, this is your co-host your co-host. My co-hosts everyone's co-host. This is everyone's co-host enterprise Business Agility Consultant. And the original Sultanof Swing. Ooh, Mr. Om Patel. No Swing. We're the Sultan. Oh, the consultants. Oh, are we? Oh, no, I'm gonna s Is that the rest of the podcast? We're just going through the lyrics. Not gonna sing it. This is, that would've been a funnier intro than what I did as the intro if you overlay music on that. Yeah. Just to weave the sultans of swing into the whole intro. Welcome back to Arguing Agile. Remember like, and subscribe. If you like this podcast or you think you get something out of it like, and subscribe. Let's talk about the impossible job description of product management. Neil Mc, Elroy Modern. PM Neil Mc Elroy. Modern PMs are expected to master business strategy, technical architecture, design thinking, systems thinking, design thinking, right? Yeah. Data analysis, stakeholder management and communication. Be sales people. Go out and visit every single one of your customers in the first whatever whatever the advice is. Working 60 hours a week involved in strategy, p and l, financials, marketing. That's the job description. You can't do all of those things in 60 hours to begin with, but also you're assuming one person has the wherewithal to actually get their head around all that. I was gonna say, you're like, well, you can't, one person can't do all that in 60 hours in a, in a week. And what I, what I heard in my head was, one person can't do all that period. Like Yeah. Well that's true too. Those jobs, some of those jobs are gonna get dropped. This is you product managers out there. If you hear Brian, you're just not communicating enough. What's going on? I'm like, oh really? I'm not like into my office sit down, sit in the kid's chair. No, not the adult chair. Like sit down. Oh, what do you mean? You mean while I'm doing sales or while I'm doing technical design and architecture? Or while I'm doing business strategy. Because those are all different audiences right there, and the sales team may not care about like. We have to have this plan to leave some technical debt on the table versus knocking off some technical debt. And we need to go a little deeper in the architecture, talk about where we're gonna be a year from now. And sales is gonna say, what, what do you care about that? Right. I'll say, Hey, it's, that's my job. I'm the CEO of the product. The product. Yeah. All of this is gonna be my, my responsibility when it comes quarter four. And you're trying to push that sale. And anyone will say like, well, Brian, it's kind of a ridiculous point you're throwing out right now. You can just push it off and do it later. Yeah. Prepare it later. Sure. So now, now you're telling me how to do my priority. Like, this is where the product management, like this is where you lose. It's like there's always gonna be somebody in the business. Because you're, you might be the CEO of the product. Right. I'm gonna keep saying that flagrantly, because I, I enjoy saying that.'cause I, nobody, nobody with real experience believes you're the CEO of the product. Yeah. Because of what I'm talking about is like, well, if I make a decision and it de optimizes sales, now the VP of sales is gonna scream at me and then make me change my decision. And then if I change the decision, now the VP or CTO is gonna come down and be like, this is ridiculous. You know, again, then they're going to yell at me for, and now quote Brian doesn't communicate well enough. That's what, that's, that's the way it's gonna manifest. The person who comes down on you, the first is gonna start the chain, right? Yeah. So you're gonna start spending more time communicating if that's what you're accused of not doing enough. But then very quickly CTO in this example will come back and say, architecture's a mess. They can't continue to do it this way. We're gonna drown in td. All of this stuff. Should you really even be asked to do all of those things on top of trying to strategize the path forward with your product that you're the CEO of? Or should you be able to offload some of that work? Maybe not communicating to the customer, because that should be your job. One that's like, that should be you leading that, but maybe the technical stuff you could offload to someone else. the point that I can hear clearly now, someone screaming at their tv I was gonna say screaming at their tv, like their grandma in the eighties over here. Like, ah, turn the tv. Don't be throwing the remote at the tv. Oh man, the clicker sorry. The arguing point will be well, Om, that's ridiculous. Like no one said you had to do all those things like, you, you but, but it's your job to facilitate All those things. So now , you don't really have control of any of the work. You're just hoping that you repeat the message enough where people get sick of hearing you and then, they help you do it or whatever. That's certainly true in a situation where you have absolutely no authority over these peers of yours. Yeah. You're trying to influence them the best you can, but you really can't control what they do 'cause they have other priorities. You know what helps with that? Controlling the finances, that helps. It helps a lot. That certainly helps when you come to the end of the year and you're like, I give engineering this much money for this much staff, or whatever, or I pay marketing this much to promote by products, and then you're near the end of the year and you're like, you know what? I see a downturn in marketing quality or engagement online or whatever numbers that you are using the measuring, and you say, look, guys I am real concerned about the quality I'm getting for the money I'm putting this department. Because again, I assume the place that like you work it at, or I assume the place that you work at is a PM where you don't control the finances. There is some, like silo is going on that is a lot of places like that. Right. So yeah, I agree. And there are those places where you are not funded adequately to begin with on some of those things. And consequently, you don't come through with you don't meet expectations. Yeah. So your reward is they're gonna cut funding even more. Yeah. Well, on, on my other side of the PM role obviously is like impossibly overloaded. And another point is if you're holding out for someone with all these s skills, abilities, unicorn experiences. Yeah. You're basically holding out for a unicorn. Yeah. So it's like you got your job role open or 700 applications in 24 hours and none of them fit? I'm just wondering what, the typical product manager on the market, like how many years experience five. Yeah, I was gonna guess at that. Yeah. Three to five years. Three to five is mid-level they're saying. I guess nobody could have the statistic, but I, I'm just wondering how many product managers out there. Oh, if anybody would have statistics, it would be McKinsey. So this cpo club.com. It's, it's citing a McKinsey study. They did, but they did it in 2014. Well, no, this says pragmatic Marketing Inc. 2016 study of almost 10 years ago. Yeah. It's, it's, it's like nine years ago. I mean, it is not great, but. 26% of product managers polled had three to five work years followed by 24% with six to 10. Click on that link. It says the rest, the report here. Oh, oh, oh. Let's see if, if it even opens. Oh, there we are. P, DF. So this, are you seeing this crap or, oh, sorry. I dunno. That's not cool. I'm sure this study is great. That's it. That's the one. So that's the one. I don't know if you can, you can zoom that up. I can zoom this a little bit there. Scroll it. So people with under three years experience only represent. 19% of the respondents in this study, and then nearly everybody else is in the middle of the distribution between three to five years. 26%, six to 10 years, 24%. And then over 10 years is a lot actually. 31%. I didn't expect that much. But also as you know, on the podcast, this is 2016, and these people are claiming to have 15 plus years experience in product managers. They're claiming they were product managers in 1999. So I'm gonna say, let me see your data. Yeah. And fun. Like, here's your ticket. Like you've been pulled over by the fun police. That's what I'm saying right now. I don't believe it. Well, listen, in the nine, nine years since there's been an awful lot of product management certifications been handed out, so you don't know now, right? How many product managers that are out there. They need to do another studies I think an updated version of it, but possibly with fewer graphics. I wanted to get some numbers here because I was gonna say, you're looking for this unicorn and if they even exist is beside the point if they even exist,. You're passing over like that can do the job because you have this unrealistic expectation in your head because you know, all the, these HBR articles and Forbes articles tell you that the CEO of the product should be able to do everything, that's right. Master with, with 25 years of experience. Yes. Yes. 25 years experience in ai. Because machine learning is not cool enough yeah. Ai it's like machine learning without the math. Like there's a, I got, sorry. There's a lot of like good quips I could throw in here. One thing that I didn't give credence because again, I hate the term CEO of the product is like the concept being expressed is you have the ownership like a CEO. You take ownership of everything that you're involved with. That's somebody arguing for would point out to be like, well, because the job gets overloaded is because we end up taking ownership of all these things. So you need to be a better communicator and let people know you're overloaded or get sidekicks as a CO has, you're right. Yeah. Or hire people. Except you're back to where I was say yes. Oh, you could hire people if only you had the budget. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I don't know this one. On a scale of one to how, how many balls a circus clown can juggle at one time before dropping them about four or five. When they're not on fire? No, no, they're all on fire. Oh, well then maybe one. Yeah. So impressive to watch, but someone's gonna get hurt. That's what I take from that category. Speaking of getting hurt, let's talk about the 60 hour work week. Even Marty Cagan Oh yeah. He has a great quote in one of his books that says, he's not saying that you have to work 60 hours to be a good product manager, but he is saying he's never met anybody that he considered a great product manager that worked any less than 60 hours. So in other words, you can work less. If you wanna be a not so great product manager, listen, you can take weekends if you want. If you want to be a loser, how dare you. I took weekends last week yeah. What the heck? You want another weekend Om? This is gonna exactly this, this is gonna turn to a trend at some point. Next thing I have, that next thing you're gonna ask for days off when you're having your baby, you just gotta hustle. Om. You gotta hustle that. That's my, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm coming out the gate. I'm coming out swinging true. With this, against this hustle culture nonsense. So if you're saying that like, no, Brian, one person must do all these things, they must facilitate all these things. I'm gonna say, well, one person can't do all this, so you're gonna get help for that person. No, you're not gonna get help for that person. I've never seen a product manager, like an individual contributor, product manager with a staff like a product operations popped up for a second. Same thing with uh, ux uh, researchers , right, they extend the capabilities of the, of the UX person, because in a good organization like UX can't be a shared service like ux, each team needs their own UX person because they're doing a lot of the offloading of going out and, and talking to customers and arranging sessions and, and those sessions need to be prepped when you talk to customers. Who's gonna do that? Well, the product manager's gonna do it, right? They can also be the graphic designer 'cause. Why not? Yeah, sure. I mean, in small companies they do, you know? Mm-hmm. They're doing Figma mockups and now people online are clamoring to just give them more AI tools look under my jacket. I happen to have an AI tool you can buy, and you don't need to hire a legitimate designer for $150,000 or whatever. My tool you can buy for $50,000. And if you don't get the right solution the first time, just keep trying actually in an unlimited amount of dollars because you just spend tokens forever. Right, right. Yeah. Sorry. YouTube's really gonna pull that too, too. Yeah, sorry. YouTube they're the super predators of 2025 AI companies. That's what we're saying. Where all the hits of the eighties are coming back in 2025. Oh man. This is becoming a sassier podcast. The issue here is Marty Cagan's saying it. Everyone's gonna listen and at least consider it. When someone like Marty Cagan says it the executives will read that in a book when they finally get around to like, well, you should read, inspire to know how products are supposed to work, and they'll give it a shot. And they'll read that and they'll be like, oh, see here it says they gotta work 60 hours minimum to be successful. That kind of stuff that, it gives an expectation that spreads. And in and of itself saying someone's gotta work more to be more effective in this mainly communication based role. I don't even necessarily have a problem with that. My issue is like, I don't have a problem with that. But I'm at a point in my career where like all those years of like being in the office until nine, 10 o'clock at night trying to get a release together. Mm-hmm. You know, getting out early with the customer and ear, early mornings, late nights, that kind of stuff. Entertaining all like, I, I've done all that. I have the benefit. All that's in the past of my career. And now I'm in the phase of my life where I've prioritized you know, family and other things like that. Yeah. Now better got older parents, stuff like that. Like I, there's no way I could have done what I'm doing now in my personal life and all of that stuff. So basically what you're saying is don't have a personal life. When I hear 60 minimum, by the way. Exactly. That's what I hear. I hear. Don't have kids. Like, you don't, don't move your relationships forward. Don't be there for your parents or whatever. I think it's just this whole mysticism about having the work, these endless hours, burning the candle at both ends, burning all your candles in a day. It's ridiculous, right? Yeah. I mean, there's evidence, I guess behind the other point on here that Europeans don't do that, and yet they churn out pretty good products. So why us? It's maybe just a local. US based, right? Or America is based. Culturalism there around product management that you have to keep your nose to the grindstone. Until the grindstone wears out. It's ridiculous . the grindstones gonna wear out. Sure, sure. It is. You keep doing that kid. Yeah. Right. Really what happens is it like the cycle leads to burnout. Burnout leads to turnover, and then rinse and repeat. You know, we'll get another whipper snapper in here. Fresh. Fresh. I remember somebody once told me , Brian, you need, you're bringing in these candidates. I need you to bring on someone fresh. I was like, what does that mean? I was like, are you telling me to not interview older workers? Is that what you're telling me? And they're like, oh, no, I would never say that, Brian. But we need people with fresh ideas and people that are, they're ready to jump in. I remember this conversation like it was yesterday. It was a long time ago. And I remember just like, not even skipping a beat,, so you're telling me not to hire older people, is what you're telling me? No. Yeah. So the funny thing is, I guess not really even funny. That definitely not funny. You could probably have that same conversation in several companies today, right? Bring somebody fresh in, bring in a new person who has fresh ideas. Like people with 3, 5, 10 years of 15 years of experience can't come up with fresh ideas. Yeah. How do you believe that? It doesn't shock me because your culture's a grindhouse and if you don't change anything, you're you're always gonna do the same thing. Bring in people, burn 'em out grind 'em down, burn 'em out ship 'em out, get new people in, rinse and repeat. Yeah. That's not the new ideas culture. No, no, it's not. The irony of that culture though, is they think they want to inspire innovation by bringing in new, new blood, right? Yeah. But actually what happens in reality is the opposite. They're not innovating because they're burning people out. These people get jaded pretty quickly. You get someone else in, just give 'em some time and then just keep doing that. Yeah. Yeah. And then you turn around and then you're that windsurf guy that like was the engineer that started there, and then Yeah. He got nothing. They're over here on, on social media being like, oh no, all of our people got compensated. And he, and he's like, he's like, whoa. Oh, it's my stapler. Like that was. Yeah, we should go find that video so we could watch it where he is. Like somebody had to track him down and interview him. I, I don't, I don't know. Anyway, track your working hours and, and also like consider when you have conversations about like something that stress you out at work for the day or when you're driving or in the shower I do this a lot when I am either about to go to bed or when I first wake up my brain rearranges itself when I'm sleeping. I solve architectural problems, when I'm either laying down to bed, or when I wake up immediately because when I wake up I can solve issues in 20 minutes. That I beat my head against for two hours. Arrested. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, that kind of stuff is like, oh, you're thinking about a work problem and you're thinking about what you wanna do first when you get behind your keyboard when you get down with your daily community right? Yeah. Keep a little notepad with you at all times, like by the bed. Keep it with you in your desk. Keep it with you in your car. And just jot down all those times that you're working on little tasks like that. And then consider them work. If you're a millennial, you could just say, Siri, take a note. Yeah, true. You know, just write down all those times and then consider them work, because I think you're gonna be shocked that you're gonna get to 60 hours pretty fast. Keep track of all that because you're gonna be, you're gonna be shocked how fast you get to 60 hours. What is, when someone's like, you gotta work 60 hours, what does that mean? You know, that, that, that's, that's another side of like, long hours are just table stakes. The argument that I'm making now is these high impact roles. Require high commitment, when I was on contract you were working with founders and founders are willing to work an unlimited amount of hours I'm sure they were willing to work all day long 'cause they knew they were gonna just, there something in it for them. They were gonna cash out at the end of that rainbow. They were gonna ca at the end of that train tunnel. You know, their light was a pile of money. Whereas this engineer over here, I should go find 'em 'cause they're talking about him so much. Oh, I wish I could, oh my poor guy. Anyway, that's what they're gonna claim. And the founder in order to take you more seriously, you gotta, when they're there and when they're showing up, you gotta be there with 'em. I worked for a guy, he showed up the office, 6:00 AM. He's like, there's no way I can do work. At home.'cause my my family would like see me up and wanna talk to me and stuff. And he was like diving into like financial numbers and statistics. Right. And he'd had to build reports and stuff like that. And he'd get in the office at 6:00 AM and he'd have productive just like the, just like I do with development.

I started at like 6:

45 AM and then between 6:45 AM and 9 45, I have three hours where nobody talks to me. That's all fine. Except you shouldn't be doing that at 6:45 PM also, right? Yeah. Yeah. Look, just understand that you have a life. Everyone only has 24 hours in their day, so you've just gotta make the most of your day in some form. Right. Work. So what was that phrase I'm trying to remember. Somebody said, do you work to live or do you live to work? Everyone has to answer that for themselves. Yeah, well hey, while you're working all those hours Mr. CEO of the product you know, let's, let's talk about that fantasy. Well, while you're grinding, let's talk about this pm as CEO metaphor. it's been popular since Ben Horowitz's 2012 blog post. Let's go. Let's go see if we can find that. It says good product managers. Let's see. It's the Andreen Horowitz. Horowitz. Ben Har Horowitz. Yeah. So the metaphor, CEO, of the product, I guess it originally came from this article written in 2012. Good product managers know the market. Let's see, let's read here. Let's see. A good product manager is a CEO of the product. Oh, okay. There it is right there. Its the second sentence. A good product manager takes full responsibility and measures themselves in terms of success of the product. They're responsible for the right, product, right time and all that entails. Bad product managers have a lot of excuses. Not enough funding. Engineering manager's an idiot. Microsoft has 10 times as many engineers working on it. I'm overworked. I don't get enough direction. The CEO of the product, don't worry about how much funding I give you. Oh, you're the CO of the product. Why don't you suck it up? It's funny that he preface the whole article by saying it was written 15 years ago. It's not relevant anymore. that's ridiculous. I think this whole thing contradicts everything else underneath it. Probably. Product managers create leverageable, collateral. FAQs, presentation. White papers, bad product managers complain. They spend all day answering questions for sales. Good product managers anticipate the serious product flaws and build real solutions. Bad product managers put out fires all day. There's a lot in this that I have an issue with. Yeah. Is that the whole article is good. Good product managers do this. Bad product managers do that. I think that that's how it's formatted. But there might be more beyond the ad as surface. No. Oh, that's, no, that's it. That's it. Oh, okay. I thought there was more. Okay. Well, if that's the case, this may be about a dozen things here. Yeah. That he decrees. Good managers do and bad managers don't. Good product managers send their status reports on time every week because they're disciplined. Bad product managers forget to send their status reports. Why? We send the status reports Exactly. In 2012, that's what they did. I was over here talking to customers and selling yachts. I mean, I'm just saying like you had budgets for yachts. anyway, like, listen, you need to just take ownership, kid., Stop crying that you want nights and weekends off. Get back in there. The point of what he said was CEOs take responsibility of everything., Bold. Statement., Bold claim in the modern era that CEOs take responsibility. Especially in light of, given that you don't have everything you need. You don't have the budget, you don't have the time and the day to do everything, but you take responsibility. Yeah. Yeah. But it, I mean, again, isn't he making my point for me of like, good product managers just figure out a way to do it. We had the Extreme Ownership podcast. With a lot of this, we hashed that in that. So like, I dunno how great of a category this is, because I could take product manager out of this and put any other job position in here and say oh, you're a good product marketing manager. Don't complain that the code is bad. Get in there in a repo and start fixing things it sounds ridiculous, right? Yeah. Because it is.'cause it is ridiculous. Thinking like a CEO encourages strategic, business oriented decision making. Articles like this frame the role as prestigious Hey, you're the CEO of the product. You're the main person that decides everything. Get in there kid. You got the fame, you got the money, oh, you don't have either one of those. You also don't have any authority. So PMs have responsibility without authority. That's the bottom line from all of this stuff. Yeah. Yes. That's the delusion here. It's like you're not the CEO of the product. And that's, even he walks back that whole article and says like, you know what? This isn't really relevant for modern PMs. And he walks the whole thing back. And I would have to say he probably got sick of getting challenged with this one is like, well, you have no authority over anyone. Right. And the CEO can just decide like, you know what? I'm gonna take out a loan and move all my development offshore and do whatever and not you and fire all my engineers if they have a problem consistently enough. Sure. And they will Absolutely. That, that CEO has authority, right. You're lucky to have influence. Yes. Yeah. Your CE might come in and tell you what your roadmap's gonna be. Exactly. And I would say that's applicable, more applicable to most PMs than telling them, Hey, quit crying about how much money you get from the business. Don't worry about it. Why you worry about that? Right. Just do the best you can. Yeah. Focus on that. Showcase something successful first and then they might listen to you. We're not gonna hire a QA department or customer service department, or, or more than one developer. Yeah. Go fix quality yourself. Yeah. You have total control over what you put out. Yeah. Also get that thing done today, by the end of the day. By the way, kid, I'm laughing'cause it's just so ridiculous. Yeah. Calling yourself a CEO of the product and you can't even expense.$500. A 500 tool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Exactly. You can't approve a, a cloud code subscription or a Cloud max subscription or whatever, right? Yeah. What, 200 bucks a month whatever it is. I don't remember what it was. Yeah. So, but you know what I can see being attracted to this is people that are ego-driven that or just plain naive. I mean, the ego-driven folks they could live in an environment like this where they just blame everyone else. Of course. Yes. You know? Yeah. I mean, they, theoretically you should be taking ownership, I just don't see it working, is what I'm saying. I just don't see it working. It's tough for me to see the other side here. Because this is the most broken thing. Every role and every company has a different mix of what are you clearly accountable for as a product manager? What, what decisions have been delegated to you and what decisions. Rest with the CEO or the director or whatever, some other team or whatever, right. If you're willing to write that down, then I'm willing to have a real conversation about this. But if you want the comfort of always being able to move a goalpost when something makes you uncomfortable. Because, because again, like the product manager is the one that's supposed to be like getting evidence and making the evidence based decisions. And when you run that up the chain and people want the ability to mess around the data or throw out certain things to make certain cases and the, you know what I mean? Like ego just doesn't work in this, ego destroys this whole that's why this category, I, I'm not gonna get over this category. Yeah, yeah. No, I, I'm, I'm with you on that. Definitely. Alright, well I'm gonna set the reality distortion field to maximum volume and we're gonna move on to the next category because this is a, ended up, I thought it was a good category and the planning and it ended up being a terrible category and now I'm depressed. So speaking of the depressed. Let's explore the human Swiss army knife phenomenon of the do do everything person. That Modern PMs have, have found 'em. So they're, they're coding prototypes now with AI tools, running qa, running customer support. Doing all of their marketing potentially themselves. Working with sales. Working with the development team with architecture and design. And they're doing features and they're and they, they're one-stop shop. Basically Jack of all trades. Jack of all trades. That's right. That's cool. I guess. How do you, how do you find people like this? Well I will tell you it is much easier to make people like that. So there we have hang up. Number one in this category is nobody wants to train anymore. So you thought I was gonna say, nobody wants to work anymore. Didn't you just No, nobody. No, no. I knew where you were gonna go. That's right. With the training side of it. Nobody wants to work at the Salt mine anymore. Getting your hands dirty. Om that's what, that's what they'll say. They'll say, Om, you just gotta get in there and get your hands dirty. We don't have, we don't have budget for scrum masters. We need people that are willing to get their hands dirty. That's assuming you know what to do when your hands are dirty. Yeah, because I mean, some of these folks don't necessarily have the chops to know what to do with their hands in there. Right. So what do you, what do you do now? Like you said, they're not being trained. They're not being given budget to go out and get trained, but yet they're supposed to be jack of all trades, get your hands dirty, get something turned out pretty quickly. How do you do that? How do you find these people? Well, I'll tell you how most people do it. You create chaos and then good people step up and fix it. And then you take the credit. That's how I've seen the bad people succeed in product management. The argument here is, if your teams are cross-functional and they should be like argument for me you will start absorbing some of that cross-functionality over time if your teams truly are cross-functional. And I think as an organization you have to, you have to have intent to get your teams up to that level. If you're not sure how get outside help, well, if you're not in control of any budget and anybody, you have to go beg somebody for every single scrappy dollar or whatever, this is like one of the first things that's out the window you know, and then the other thing is you have a little bit of control of your time. That would be the other thing I hope is you have a little bit of control over your time to maybe if they're not training you, you can put some time aside to learn some new skills on the job training, that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, again, like the benefit of working at a small company is you get to wear multiple hats. Every employee gets to wear multiple hats, but that's just because a small company can't hire the right people to fill the positions. And Yeah. You're being asked to do multiple jobs, basically. But this is doing multiple jobs. Right, right. Well, there's a word for that. We'll get to it in the next category, I'm sure. But yeah. Doing everyone else's job, that's not on the job training that's when you're doing everyone else's job. Designing. We're not gonna hire a UI ux designer. The product manager's gonna do it all we're not gonna hire a UX person to help do interviews and surveys and capture feedback and to make meaningful interactions between the customers. We're gonna have the product manager do that, or the dev team do that, right? And they're not gonna get any help from a professional like that was, yeah. But what you're really doing is like, the more of the stuff that I said before, like customer support and marketing stuff, and you doing QA and doing all these AI assisted prototypes and whatnot but where's the actual business like. PM skills being used. Where's that? Is that stuff getting minimized? Like where's our business strategy? How does the product hook into that? How is the product gonna advance the business strategy over the next two years? Where's our long term, like all the stuff that I think of, like when's the pm Like hitting the street to help expand their knowledge of the business. Alright, let someone else do that. Well, I think someone else, I think someone else wants someone else to do that. Exactly. And they don't want the PM to do that. Yes. Yeah. The more of this stuff that gets thrown on the PM to do the less actual PMing gets done. And by PMing what people will be like, well Brian, that's a pretty squishy statement. You need to like quantify that, but gimme some things that the PM would do. I don't know. How about business strategy? Who else is gonna do it? Competitive analysis. How about, keeping your eye open about trends in your industry. Mm-hmm. You know, going to how long does it take to read all your latest industry publications or blogs or follow all the people that are, at the edge of your industry. Like if you're in government that's constantly, PhDs are constantly putting out research papers about things that may be relevant to you and your industry. You need to be on the edge of that stuff.'cause you go to a conference and stuff, people are gonna talk about, you're not gonna know what they're talking about. So like, all of that. Staying ahead. Normally that time is spent on nights and weekends and I'm saying consider all that work time now. Right. Because it's work time. It's all work. I agree. This stuff like keeping an eye on the regulatory changes in your industry. Right. Yeah. Because if you're blindsided by that, well, it doesn't matter what you're building. I gotta imagine that like lawyers and stuff are like, they're keeping an eye on what cases are going through the court right now? You know, especially federal, well, I mean, federal lawyers or their own brand of lawyer, but yeah, they're probably constantly keeping an eye on who made what decision when, . See where the winds are blowing type of stuff. This is the same thing, except it's not an extra thing you do. It is a job. It is the job. Yeah. It's a job to make sure that you, you're not gonna get lapped by your competitors and that the market is not gonna move on without you. And if nobody's flying that plane, there's only one parachute. Again, if you're gonna talk about taking ownership of stuff and get on that high horse and saying you need to be taking ownership, I can't trust that. Like, because people have a random VP director title that they're doing these jobs. Right. I want them to be doing these jobs. Yeah. They themselves also probably have 15 things that they need to be doing. At a time. In addition to people management, which didn't even appear on anything in this list so far. Right. Actually managing people. The takeaway in this category is like, start marking down. Like write down the tasks that you do during a week. Right. Or even in a day. Like, try it for one day. Like, write down just a list of like everything that you do oh, I facilitated a discussion about this, or I made a decision about whatever. You know, really think about what you are doing, like research a little bit into this or whatever. You know really think about like step back and think about like, how to explain what you have done to somebody that doesn't know anything about technical or business or whatever. Explain what you're doing to a child. Write it down on the line and then when the day is over and you're ready to go to bed. You'll be able to look back at the list to note every task that you did and then decide did this task get me ahead or did this task get the product ahead? That's what I'm looking for is what are the non PM tasks that you're doing? I even, when we released a new version, I did a little QA test like that gets the product ahead because we gotta make sure it's quality or whatever. I'm like, that's not really what I'm talking about. That didn't really get the product. Like, it really significantly launches you forward into the future. I don't think so. And you know this suggestion of making a list of all of the, not my job things allows you to do something else, right? It allows you to look back and say, I did all of those things. Fine. Should I have been doing that? Who really should be doing? Just add another column next to it. Yeah. And then see if you can leverage that list, because now you have evidence, right. With your with your C-level folks and say, we need to get someone 'cause I'm carrying the load. Right. And if you're really doing this right, add yet another column to its right. And say, what are you missing out on? Because you're doing these things instead. Right. And you might have a chance to convince someone to get you some help. And also if we're using extreme ownership as a weapon, 'cause that's what I get outta this category. Surely PMs are compensated like founders that they're emulating. Right, right. Windsurf, sorry, sorry. Listen, if they were, they might be able to justify working a 60 hour week days, hour weeks. Right? Because they, they say, well, there's something there for me. But often they're not, you are basically making someone rich at the end of the day. Well, that's, I mean, that's, I like yachts. That's what I'm saying. I like looking at them while they sail away. So listen, Om, we wear a lot of hats here at Brian and Ohm's startup. We sure do. We wear a lot of hats and we we got yachts to buy, and there's no way we're gonna buy 'em if we give away some of those hats. I don't know why we wear so many hats. Like I can only wear one hat at a time, I guess. But the experience that you'll get working here is the reward. I'm gonna pay you in exposure. Sorry, I can't, these are supposed to be four points. Sorry. I'm sorry everyone. I'm sorry. I'm supposed to be arguing on behalf the, the learning. And the exposure to different learning experiences is invaluable. Ohm invaluable. Absolutely. We can only pay you 35 cents and four peanuts this pay cycle. Wow. Times are good. So this kind of play might work with some of the junior folks that are entering the market where you're saying, Hey look, these are greener pasture come hither, more impressionable. And as they walk across, they find themselves sucked into the quicksand. Yeah. I don't know. Experience. Yes, of course. Right? You can't just wash that out and say there's nothing to be gained there. There is, however, experience doesn't pay your bills. Oh, no. Experience doesn't. I was gonna say experience doesn't pay your divorce costs because, 'cause you've gotta burn yourself out trying to get experience under the guise of this what we've been talking about. So it's not the be all and end all of everything. So take that for what it is. Take the experience for what it's worth. But also at the same time, understand why you're doing this for you. Right. Longer term. This is the word that I was looking for earlier. I'm gonna drop it in this category because it seems appropriate in this category. And that word is exploitation. This goes back to the example I said earlier in the podcast of like, we need someone with more energy. So what you're saying is you would like to perpetuate the cycle where we get young people in here pay them peanuts. Give them this job title that has this illusionary marketing prestige built onto it. Have them give us entrepreneurial effort at entry level employee prices, and then keep doing that model until we burn those people out. The people who by the way, could have been utilizing their entrepreneurial spirit to build companies of their own. Sure. And some do escape the trap after a while. So the unempathetic the unempathetic pushback to this will be like, well, then they can go do that. They can go do it. They, they can quit and go do it. Ohm, they should have done that. And then said, you know that there's a lot of bad faith. Pushback in this category. Yeah, the other thing I thought of was that, oh, but nobody wants the stress of equity and like having to go out and make the sale to make payroll. People don't want, they don't want the ownership equity. Oh yeah, sure. It's, well that equity may pay bills better than your experience. The side effect of some of these things, is people get burned out. They leave, they go to other companies and they try to apply whatever they gained from their experience, right? Yeah , so if these are the younger entry level people, they probably haven't gained a whole lot. Because at that age bracket, they value personal time, et cetera, more than just trying to do everything for the mothership. So they're gonna go to another company and they will try to apply that there and good luck there too, because it's the same culture. Right. Then what happens I'll tell you what happens is you have no equity. And if you're one of those young people listening to this or watching this and you think the grass is greener on the other side, lemme tell you, grass is greener where you water it. We're coming to the same takeaway with a lot of these categories of, don't be a sucker. You know, that that's what we're coming to at the end of these. Like that when, when, when I said earlier is like, write down all the hours that you're thinking about work and like thinking about or mulling over work decisions. And then consider those work hours. When you're thinking about Marty Cagan's, like 60 hours, I'm betting you're probably working 60 hours already. You just don't consider if my butt's not in a chair, in a cubicle, in an office, I'm not working. Which by the way is, is that's how Jamie Dimon thinks about it. If you're working from home, you're just playing, you're playing the role home. You're just playing at the role, you gotta be in the office and then play the role. That's right. You gotta just sit, in the office and play solitaire for, or get on Zoom calls like you could have done from home. That's true. So the real founders the people with the equity they have the control and with this shiny title PM like you have the illusional control, there are some things you can do to fix that. Obviously equity's better because then when someone running the business talks to you, they're talking to you like a partner. Mm-hmm.'cause you have equity, right , versus talking to you. Like someone that's on that burnout wheel. Like, you're only here temporary kid. I don't care what you have to say. Yep. Come to me when you want the adult decisions made. So, it sounds like the role is problematic. That's what I'm positing this late in the podcast. The role is problematic and it's probably the people yeah. Yeah. It's, that's just an individual problem. You're absolutely right. It has nothing to do with the, the whole system. You know why I love systemic issues, I'll save this one for the last. You know what I love more than a good systemic issue? A good industrial complex. That perpetuates flowing money. And wants to keep the status quo. That's right. Y'all we're talking about US government today on the podcast. No, no we're not. Just kidding. Who said that? Just kidding. So massive ecosystem in product management, they got Maven courses for sale. You got Reforge, you have that, that, that kind of thing. Yeah. Big money, big names. You got books you can buy, you got conferences you can go to. You got a multi, what I would assume is a multi-billion dollar industry. I don't really know the size of the industry here, but I would guess that it's multi-billion dollars. And I would guess that it is like if LinkedIn or one of these social media companies ever decided they just wanted to take a shot at product management like LinkedIn just started showing like ridiculous like God, what, what was the one they like? Quiet quiet fracking, quitting, quiet fracking or whatever. I, sorry. No, it was like quiet, quiet. Cracking. That was what it was. White cracking. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like, what is this? Why is this like a feature, a featurette? So I was like, so they can just pick any feature that they want and just go grab the videos that are available and throw 'em into the gallery. Because people are talking about a trend. So basically they pick whatever trend is trending. No matter how it got trending, they fan it is what they do. Oh, and then fan it, right? Yeah. Well, how do I know they're not just creating the trend? Well, they are in many cases they are. Okay. So what if LinkedIn just decided one day that they wanted to run a hashtag of like, product management is dumb. Like, or Agile is dead. Yeah. Just like a whole bunch of galleries of people being like, no, no. Product management's a ridiculous job. You know, like those people can't get anything done because they put so many roles together and it's, it's dead. Nobody hires product managers anymore. Product engineers is a new thing. Yeah. This is not out of the, out of the ordinary at all. I mean this, I'm pretty convinced that this happens all the time and you'll see it. You'll see when you see one of these things, you'll kind of, yeah. It, it will tingle your right, your psyche, and then suddenly you see people piling on it. Yeah. As soon as a few people pile on one side, a few people, a few more perhaps pile on the other side, and you get this arms race going. Now if we're really smart about this, we can recognize that, but there's not a whole lot you can do. Yeah. Right. Because LinkedIn, you correctly identified LinkedIn just a, few moments ago as a social media platform. It used to be a professional networking connection site that stopped some time ago. Now they're basically a Facebook. The product ecosystem which I would argue like a podcast, blogs, like that's the real books, you know what I mean? The ecosystem. So theoretically it should support a standard level of training. Like go read the Marty Cagan books to start there's a few creators that are actually pretty good go follow them. Mm-hmm. And theoretically, community should provide peer support, although I would argue like the pro, I don't know how much peer support the product community actually like, does. There's a lot of people in the product community that are like charging for their wares. This is a nice thing about the agile community there, there was much more of a spirit of like. I'm gonna create a Miro template or something just give it out for free and everyone can use it and dog pile on it and prove it. And like the, our product, product community doesn't, they don't really do that as much in my opinion, probably'cause they're working 60 hour days and doing everything. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. I mean it's, it's an industry that profits off of complexity. Ambigu. Complexity and I don't know if the industry really solves the, any of those problems. No. And, and as you know, and if you've been watching our podcasts, which you should be I lean very, very firmly towards this you know, the apprentice model, right? So the industry should have that, and it's context specific if you're in defense or healthcare or biotech or whatever. If you're there, you should be able to call on somebody, a, a community there of product folks that can take you under their wing. And when I say that, what does that actually look like? Well, maybe they can shadow you for a bit. They're not compensated sure. Who come up with NDAs or whatever else non-disclosure agreements Yeah. Or whatever. That's fine, but at least they can see how something's being done. Now, if you are one of those people who is an apprentice here, if you get the opportunity to shadow three or four people, you're gonna now see three or four people doing things. Obviously in different ways. But you're learning how it's being done in real life. That's your apprenticeship, that's your quote unquote internship. You're not being paid, but you're learning. Right. Right. That is missing and it's also missing in the agile industry as well. Mm-hmm. So I know several people that are, that are now trying to reinvent themselves, second career folks, et cetera. Right. And I don't have an answer. Yeah. I mean the role definitely needs to be fixed. I mean, the, that's also the issue when I see someone come up with a new framework, or even in the Agile stuff about like the no estimates or no backlogs or whatever other new things people come out with to try to like. You know, they're going to a talk, so they gotta develop something that is like revolutionary or whatever. Like they, they're the PM is the same way, but people are like, oh, here's a new strategy template, or here's a new way to do your backlog, or a new tool how many times we need to reinvent Jira. I realize I said Jira, I had to get it outta my mouth there real quick. Every time they do that it's under the guise of like helping solve a problem. Every time they do that, I feel that every framework created brings another complexity into the field and also potentially brings another. Responsibility that now you also have to take ownership of that as well. Like if, someone came out with a framework for PMs to market their thing. Like here's a two by two marketing framework or something. Now we don't need marketers'cause the PMs do that as well. Now here's AI prototyping tools. Now we don't need designers or developers. Ridiculous. We'll let the PMs do that. Yeah. You know, 'cause again, like we don't know what they do all day. They do everything. So you don't know what they do. Right. So you assume they do nothing. Yeah. In a nutshell, that's basically what Agile coach is, or Scrum Masters. I mean. Yeah. I agree with you. There, there is no, there is no United sort of like, what is product management all about? Or what should it be all about? And then a concerted effort to nurture folks into the field. Right. I would say there's even the funny thing about this is there's even the last. I'm not even calling for a centralized body of knowledge or authority or whatever. Even Agile has more structure, like as a community and like what are our principles? What do we believe in kind of stuff Like product management has none, nothing. It's literally whatever. Anybody with the loudest, sexiest voice with the, the trend that LinkedIn decides to promote this week, like that, that's what product management is. It's what we're saying really is to, there's no principles. That's what I'm to, to be successful. You just basically need to write down whatever the heck it is that you want other people to believe and say, this is it folks. Right? Yeah. And unfortunately there's too many of them out there and, and when you look deeper into what they're saying. Some of it may float. Right. Most of it doesn't . yeah. So that's the problem. Yeah. let's move to a summary here because I'm a little depressed. I have to admit, after this podcast, so I don't know what we can do to fix a PM industrial complex. That would be a, that would be a nice takeaway here. Like if before you're gonna spend money on a, on a prototyping tool, or if you're gonna spend money ask yourself like, does it, does it help me do less things better? Or is this adding more responsibilities that I have to do now before you decide to spend all your monopoly money on AI tools to help you prototype because you're designers too slow or whatever. How about you fix the. The real issue there, you know? Yeah, absolutely agree with that. Yeah. I dunno. On the 10 ladder rung of base level and then at the top of the pyramid that the pyramid scheme pyramid that we're climbing. Like what, what, what rung are we on now with the industrial complex? Oh, I think we're still in a solid two or three. Okay. We haven't even, haven't even made any progress. Alright, well, anyway. Product management, it isn't a job, it's a socially acceptable form of workplace masochism. Sorry. I was gonna say exploitation. That was what I meant, but for some reason in my brain wouldn't let me let me try another one out on you. Lemme try another one out on. Let's go with the second one. Pro product management. It's we need an entire industrial complex to teach all of our executives and business people around the world that no two product managers are the same, and their responsibilities are not the same at any company. And that the, the job itself as a role is totally not broken. It's all fine. So I don't know why I'm pitching you on these, but I I, I am enjoying pitching on these, these studies. These are great. It isn't, it isn't a job. It's a role that takes the skill of at least five different people while only paying you for, for one. Yeah. What's there to not agree on here? Right? I agree with all of those. Listen, all of those things. I mean, I enjoy product management. I do have to say even after all this but when you step back and look at it it is a pretty insane career path. I'd say it is pretty insane. Maybe product managers should, take up like doing magic or something. Oh, I didn't know where you get flaming chainsaws. Like what? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Tossing, tossing flame or trying to catch flaming chainsaws. You know, the funny thing is like, any product manager listen to this. Like, they're gonna be like, yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. Nobody's gonna listen to this. It's gonna be like, no, you guys aren't being completely unreasonable. I am the CEO of the product. I've never worked at a place where I didn't have, and I don't work 60 hours. I'd like to hear from the PMs that are like, wow, I've got equity at every company ever. Or Why would you ever go to a company and not have equity? You know, maybe that's, maybe that's the response we're gonna get. Like the again, my challenge that I said earlier in the podcast start writing down what you're doing, even one day of your PM stuff and figure out, hey, is this stuff really getting me ahead in product management? Is it getting the product ahead? With the customers. Yeah. You know, is it advancing or is it just like busy work that really, you should just have more people and you know, what would you say? Find out? No. Yeah. Well that's, that's, that's true too. I mean you say no to the people you can say no to. Like, of course. Yeah. That would be, that'd be the challenge there. Indeed. Anyway, like that was the podcast for today. I like product management. It's my job. I quite enjoy it, but sometimes I'm like, this job is ridiculous. I think a lot of people say that. You know their own jobs that are not in product management, but pretty much everybody could say that about their job. That is in product management. 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