AA87 - Burnt-Out Product Managers

Product management is a funny discipline. We're gonna look at a post today a week ago. Somebody illuminated us on product management and how they've become happy as a result of essentially waving the white flag and saying, I succumb! Yeah. Yeah. Let's see. How can you be happy in product management? Let's look at that today., Let's look at, one person's, , method so there was this post on product management that's been making its rounds on LinkedIn. here's what the post says, the title reads As a product manager, I stopped doing product management and became happier as a result. So anybody who's working product management would definitely be drawn to this, like a, a bee to a flower. Like, Okay, this guy's saying he became happy by stopping. What he was doing. All right here, product management. I became enamored with product management after reading inspired by Marty Cagan and drinking all the Kool-Aid like continuous discovery habits, et cetera. That is an interesting sentence because Right. He drops in Marty Cagan and his book, and then he says, Kool-Aid, and so you look at that and you go, So did you really become enamored by that or did you just read the book and say, nah, I don't like it. It obviously doesn't work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Obviously it's cool. Product management doesn't work here, right? This is a continuation of a theme. Oh, agile doesn't work here.. Right? That was our previous podcast. Everybody. Oh, oh, Product management doesn't work here. What? What a great idea for a podcast. It just doesn't work here. Yeah. Let's back to the article. I struggled for years trying to coach my teams, my stakeholders, my leadership on product management practices, but mostly it fell into deaf ears. Shouldn't be onto deaf ears. Yeah. Onto the truth is people just want to deliver features. Oh, I say so first of all, okay, as a product person, they're saying that they try to. For quote unquote, many years, and it fell onto deaf ears. To me that smacks of they just did an art to coach. I'm sorry. You couldn't do that for many years and not be effective. Change your tactics. Do something different. So that's the first thing I wanna say about that. It's like Okay. Fell into deaf ears. So what do I do? I'm just gonna give in I capitulate. Oh, sorry. I read that. And, I replaced all texts of coach, , to communicate. And, , I read it as I'm, I'm bad at communicating. And, , I just got outta college and got this PM job at this FAANG company. Mm-hmm.. And I never really learned how to communicate in all my life., and now that I'm in a job that basically communication is the majority of the job, I find that I'm bad at communication but I'm good enough in the role that the company wants me at where they don't wash me out. Yeah. I'm bad at communication and I'm not gonna start improving now because like you said, I'm working at a FAANG company and they're keeping my pockets stuff full of cash. I just like it though. Oh, we haven't got to that yet. Hang on, hang on. Back to the article. So I stop doing product management Executive A thinks we should build X. Yes, sir. Coming right up. Stakeholder B thinks we should do Y. Absolutely. I'll put it in the backlog. I become a glorified high paid order taker now, but I just don't care anymore product discovery? Ha! Why do it if no one understands the need for it? I'll just deliver the feature everyone thinks we should do. The next part is important to what we're about to talk about the result. I'm much happier, less stressed, and I can get my 200 K paycheck by coasting and playing the corporate game. Great if you can do real product management, but 97% of all companies don't care about it nor understand it. Anyone else with a similar epiphany or change like this? Wow. Okay. First of all, over to you, . I want his job, . I really do. I'll take a huge pay raise right there. 200 K and he's saying he tried to influence teams. Yeah. And it didn't work. So he is giving, he is giving up basically. Right. I think it's Google and Microsoft that have pipelines from, Ivy League MBA programs directly into their company. There are those. So there, there's a good chance that this person, this is the first job that they ever had. They, they basically were recruited outta school through an MBA program directly into product management. They read some books. They read some countercultural stuff to what they learn in school. They were kind of excited by it. Had a good idea now that now they're in the real world. Air quotes, real world air quotes. Cuz again, they work for Microsoft or Google or whatever. So now they're in the real world. all that stuff's kind of hitting home. And listen, if I, if I could get, if I could get outta college and get a job making 200 k, I might have this attitude as well. the younger me a few years ago, A long time ago, actually, but might have done the same thing. Said, This is cool. I can get paid all this money. I don't really care. But that wouldn't last too long because you would get bored with yourself. you, if you're looking to make a difference, a real difference, you'd be like, Yeah, the money's good, but I really don't have a purpose in my life. Where am I gonna do, I mean, am I just going to make this check every month. So I would say, yeah, I'd enjoy the the luxuries, , coming straight out of, , an MBA class, and yeah, enjoy that for a while. But for me, that would drive pretty quickly because you're not making a difference. You're really not. I mean, he's saying he gave up right after trying, and it's like, okay, if you give up, what does that say? You're saying, I give up If executive A wants something Yes, sir. Coming right up, would you like fries with that? Right. That, that to me just says you're in it for you. That's it. So that person, while the money is fantastic, they make come a time when the tide changes, somebody else takes over. Mm-hmm., right? Where they say, Well, what value are you bringing? You're out. And then that person is literally like out, how are they going to then land a job? Where they can make a difference because they've not learned. They've not learned by failing, I guess is what I'm saying. They've not learned by trying, they tried and then they gave up. Instead of they tried, they failed, they got up, dusted themselves off, learned something from that, tried something else, or instant repeat. I mean that the school of hard knocks, I guess is how people describe that. Yeah. I'm gonna guess that part of it is I've been in large organizations where, Enough failure just gets you kicked from programmed program doesn't get you fired. And also in large programs, the other thing I've seen in large programs is, fail is mainly avoidable. If you can shift the blame to the, the right people, or I guess the wrong people, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Now you're onto something there. Absolutely. Yeah. There are certain techniques. I guess I hate to even use that word. Oh, it's, you're right. But people use them, right? Like they go into an organization, they go, Okay, nothing really, I don't understand. Everything seems to be working. I don't know about this domain. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna break something and I'm gonna fix it really fast. Yeah. Then I'm gonna go wave the flag and go look at what I just did. Yeah. Right. And, and yeah. I mean, I've seen that in large company where people do that and they're. Because people that are doing the rewarding, they just see that, Oh, this person came in, they happen to see something that was counter productive or whatever, and they did something that fixed it. Aren't they wonderful? Yeah. Let's promote 'em. I've seen that way too often in my career. this person, I think you're right the kind of money that they say they're making, I mean assuming they're not trolling, right. They are definitely in one of those companies, of the FAANG companies maybe. Sure. Yeah. And, the people that are evaluating these people are being fed what they are looking to be fed. Like, Yes sir. No sir. Yes ma'am. No ma'am. Right. We're gonna do this for you. We can do this for you too. You are really not. Doing your, your position, your, I was, I almost said title, but titles are meaningless at this stage. Yeah. Your position. any justice at all. Right. So flip side of that is somebody who comes outta college, maybe somebody their, their peer who comes outta the same MBA class, who wants to really become a product person and make a difference. You're doing them a huge disservice by simply throwing in the towel. I tried. It doesn't work. Okay. Yeah. the other people, they're kind of throwing on the buses. Anybody who comes in as a Google, Microsoft, they have pipelines out of MBA programs into, product management at their companies. But, the, the other thing that I believe, I could be wrong on this, , but I believe they have is, associate. Product manager programs where people come in and try to learn the ropes. Mm-hmm.. And the terrible thing here is that you get rolled under one of these people who's kind of checked out and now what are you learning? The other thing to, to go back to what I was kind of pointing out that kind of scares me about this environment is what happens when you build the wrong thing and then you have to wheel it back to build the right thing after expending all the development time and effort to build the wrong thing. You've blown all your dates outta the water and all, you've used all your good will with the leadership or executives or other departments or customers or whoever it is. Yeah. Or or people online and the kid, I'm, I almost guarantee this person does not build mobile apps in app stores. Almost guaranteed. Absolutely. What happens when you burn through all your goodwill or money or political capital or whatever. what happens then? if you had done some experimentations, if you had started with data and you had seek to fill in the holes first. So what happens when you actually do fail? That's where I'm going with this. And the reason I bring this up just to show all my cards, Is because I've been in quite a few shops where, executives come down and say, Just build feature X. Okay, cool. We built feature X. Now the metrics say that no one is using feature X. Okay, well, we built how many features that no one uses. How long can we do that? Until the management just cuts the whole team maybe he works for Google and that's never gonna happen. Doesn't matter. There's 50 teams on one program and he's never judged by failures. Maybe he's got his engineering manager or whatever that's judged by that kind of stuff Or maybe their metrics are totally jacked up on the back end, where they're never measured by effectiveness. They're never measured by daily active usage. They're never measured by total number of uses in their application., successes, failure, stuff like that. Maybe in the environment they're never measured like that. So like when I say that, I'm like, Well, if that's true, I doubt very much he's working for Microsoft or Google. Cause I doubt very much. They're not saying, Oh, you didn't get any new users. Okay, it's fine. It's cool. I think to go back to the question you posed, like what happens if, Right? Oftentimes it's escapism and scape cooling, right? So these people would say, Okay, we tried this. Wasn't that your idea, Fred or Mary? Right. Right. And yeah, it wasn't a good idea at all. Yeah. So the way it gets framed, whether it was their idea or not, the way it gets framed to leadership, We fail because somebody suggested something, we tried it out. I gave them the chance to experiment. Right? This was a null hypothesis, basically. Right. But, experiment in that case means building the whole solution, taking whatever six weeks, eight weeks, or whatever that's experimenting in that situation is the most expensive version Yes. Of experimenting. It's not even the fact that you're failing in the marketplace. Yeah. It's the fact that you're seen to be failing. So it's the rep damage, it's the reputation damage that is way, way more than just the, the loss of is it, is it the fact that, you really have to have a razor sharp finance people to measure the impact, on your brand. And most people just don't, They don't. Have that or do that. It it is, it's exactly that. So people that are measuring things, it's not just finance, right? Are they measuring the right things? You know, are they looking at the standard things that people talk about, like ROI and things like that? where I is very difficult to quantify because it's how do you quantify the amount of money in the, at the end of the day, Yeah, invested. That's one thing. The other thing is, is that your money or are you borrowing it? Right? If you're borrowing it then it's a different measure because it's not your money. So it's the return of capital invested and the cost of that capital to raise that capital. There's so many different financial measures that that can be used. But yeah, absolutely. Somebody needs to have a razor sharp focus on this. And figure out whether this avenue is potentially viable or not. And, and you can't do that by building a feature or building building a product worse yet, right? Mm-hmm. putting it out there and say, Oh dear, not many people used it, right? Do this as a real experiment, which is partner with your customers. Get a select group that express interest in this after you've put out the polls, et cetera, and get them in. Shorten the chain. Bring them in and say, Here's what we're thinking. It's in the lab still. You can play with it if you really want to use it in your actual product. Put it out there with a quote unquote switch. We're talking about this earlier. The customer has complete control over if and when they want to turn on the switch to experiment with a new feature. If they like it, they can keep the switch on. No one else sees it except them. if they don't like it, and if really, I mean, things go awry, then they can turn it off. Real fast. They don't have to wait for the company to deploy to production, a fix or a retraction of any kind. Yeah. Right. I don't know, man. this guy making 200 k seems disagree. He's a, he's just gonna build it with his development team and then he's gonna say yes, he's a yes man at this point for 200 K. I mean Hey, sign me up. I guess. I don't, I don't The other thing that I've seen that I think is even more damaging, like the, the damaging to the company in building things with your budget and spending people's time that you haven't necessarily proved that that's the correct thing to spend time on. That is damaging number one. But also number two, when you go and build something that customers don't like or customers can't use, won't use not feasible to use. customer usability is not done. You know, maybe you didn't, maybe you couldn't get ui ux time or whatever. I don't know. A million reasons. One of the things you said was, well, whoever's idea it was originally, whoever lobbied for it, they kind of get blamed. Okay. But I've also been in situations where the people who lobby for the changes, like VPs, sales people, stuff like that, like they're a little too high on the food chain to get blamed. So then it rolls down to like, . This is gonna be a you're, gonna laugh when I throw this one out there. I almost wanna cut to the wide angle just to get your reaction on camera. it basically rolls down to whoever it can roll down to based on like the highest paid person in the room. I specifically remember working in a work center where when something like this happens and you're like, Oh, the user, the usability of this feature is not really great. Hey, who tested this from the QA team? Which tester tested this? How come this wasn't tested better? Yeah. How come we didn't catch all this stuff? How come we didn't catch all these bugs? It, it's no longer a, it's no longer a strategic design or market fit issue. It's now's just simply a catch this issue. Right. Can we should look to blame now on the road. That's right. Right now. This is the scape, scape scapegoat-ism. Is that is so prevalent. That's why there are so many people out there across the industry in, in pm not just FAANG companies, but you know, lower tier companies where this, this prevalent. This blame game that happens. What I do find is this, people like that. Never get blamed or seldom get blamed. What they tend to do though, is they will say, Okay, I'm gonna fix this. Remember now, this is not a situation that they, Oh, here we go. Prevented to begin with. This is the, the hero, right? Yeah. So they come in and they say, Well that's, that's clearly not the right product. Why don't we try this ? And if by any happenstance that that fix the pivot lands, like even if it's like sticking to the wall for a little bit, , That's it, right? Yeah. That's it. They get the credit and they move to another company in an elevated position. Right? Yeah, I have seen that way too often. I call that rising to the highest level of incompetence. Oh, yeah. But also this is Deming's Red Bead experiment where he like the, the fact that you pulled the, like We'll, we'll cover this in the Deming podcast. The mini podcasts. Yeah. The mini, Mini Deming podcasts. The two hour Deming podcast. But also the red bead experiment. The people that pull less red beads. It's like the, statistically speaking, like if you play the game long enough, like the casino, the house always wins. Mm-hmm. In the first round, when you do the experiment, like you laud the people who, who pulled less red beads? Like, Oh look, these people are so great. Why are you guys pulling somebody red beads? Look at these people. They did it. Therefore everybody should be able to do it. Right? Yeah. Yeah. What is your problem? You guys are fired. You gotta get outta here. You're dismissed from the experiment. Go home, you win, you win. Nothing. This is the same thing, like statistically speaking like if you work in a company like this and you keep going through with no kind of control over what work comes in, right? Cuz you're your person who basically, who's in charge of controlling the work coming in, basically is decided to check out and, and say yes to everything. When I saw this post, the first thing that I thought of, Was, Oh look, here's someone who's really burnt out. That was the first thing I thought of. I was like, this person is really burnt out. And, had they, I sat down with their leadership with proper one-on-ones. maybe they could have expressed this. I'm going out on a limb now and guarantee that he sat down with his bosses, a boss. Like whatever. I don't even know. Like, where do you even work? I don't even Who are you? Who are you get outta my office. I'm going, Don't play golf. Seriously. Yeah. Get outta my office. I. but his burnout would've been detected in some way, shape, or form and then would've gotten help. I would hope that again, assuming that he's not just working for like some chief product officer who's actually just a sales guy that they got from whatever, some other big comp, Microsoft or whatever, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He should have been offered some therapy by somebody higher up. But in this case, just looking at this, it doesn't sound like he went to any great distance to remediate issue. I mean, honestly, that's what I see in there. I tried, it didn't work, so whatever. I mean, he says, I'm gonna sit here and just coast. He says he, he says he struggled for years to coach his teams and stakeholders in leadership on product management practices, and then it fell on deaf ears, right? It says, and then he says, His truth is people just want to deliver features. I see that differently though. I, I'll tell, I read between the lines clearly, but I see that as I tried it didn't work, right? So now I'm just saying, Yeah, I'll just coast along whatever, whatever they say, I'm just gonna say yes to, right? Here's what I see that, I see that as his inability to effectively coach. That's what I see. I think he should have looked at what is not working about this, right? Mm-hmm., why would you do the same thing over and over? Maybe I'm assuming again, that he only did the same thing over and over, but he didn't work. So why wouldn't you get help with that? Maybe whatever that looks like, get some experts in or just yourself, like equip yourself, like you're, you're on you're on the right track with this one, because again, like we don't know where this person works. So assuming they do work for Google, like Google has full-time Agile coaches on the staff, , there are people you could have reached out to Yep. We don't have to delve into it, but I'm just saying like, wouldn't you try that first if you were that person instead of saying, Well, I'm just gonna sit back and I mean, maybe again, I, like in the larger organizations I've been part of like reaching outside of your direct organizational unit is taboo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very taboo. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Especially if all the Agile coaches are in a dis different business practice or organizational unit or, community of practice, but the community practice actually is another organization under another director or another. Yeah. Heaven forbid if it's a freaking PMO or something. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. If all, and there's cross charges and all that crap. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Cross charges among business units. Like if you have that kind of organizational setup, then doing this, not only could it cost you real money, But also it's, it's gonna cause a big hassle for your leadership or whatever. Like, Hey, how come you don't have this talent in house? Well paid enough. Why do you have, why do you have this, this one person, going rogue, basically. Mm-hmm., that's the way it'll look on paper. Yeah. Rather than saying, Well, all, all y'all that are, that's my, that's my southern version of saying everyone, all y'all that are drinking the Marty Cagan Kool-Aid, rather than saying it that way, I would argue like in your culture there's the, they don't really have a taste for experimentation. Okay. Well let's talk about why your culture does not have the taste for experimentation. Right. Okay, Let's talk about that. Let's break that down and try to really understand that. I don't see that that has happened here. I don't see that, like my culture doesn't have a taste for experimentation because Okay. We talked about in the, in the last podcast contracting, hardcore contracting, time materials fixed cost me. So if you are in the fixed cost contracting world, I completely understand this. I'm trying to figure out a way to take the opposite viewpoint, but I need to get past where I'm at mentally to get to where you are at. Yeah. So I can figure out what the opposing viewpoint is. Sure. I need to go past have you as a product, asked enough questions about your business space to figure out why the company is not about experimentation and why your coaching is not taking, why you're, dare I say, leadership is not taking, right? Yeah. But we, we can even say management like it is got an MBA. Why your Ivy League management that you spent a whole bunch of money on, why that's not taking in this environment. Let's try to figure out why. So gimme some answers to as you why this stuff is not taking in your environment. Before we say you guys are just drinking the Kool-Aid. This Marty Kagan stuff doesn't work. Let's talk about your culture because there, there's a famous quote about culture eats some Yeah. Culture eats strategy for breakfast sake. Peter Drucker that said that. Peter Drucker. Yeah. Yeah. That's this, that's this in action. Like, hey, you got the best, you got the best strategy in the world. You got your strategy is to couple customers, figure things out, change your tactics, but here, your culture is sabotaging all of that. Yeah. Your culture is not letting you operate any of that stuff. So, hey, make a decision. Make a decision. Forget all your best practices and just do what we tell you, right? And collect your 200 K or go somewhere else so you can actually be successful and enjoy your life, you know? Yep, Yep. Or, or stay here and don't enjoy your life. Well, I guess it depends on their definition of enjoyment. It might be just banking the 200 K. So yeah, I agree with that. I, I think I can have a lot of enjoyment with 200 K. Absolutely. 200 k definitely buy a lot of enjoyment. So whoever said money by happiness didn't have enough money Clearly. Just to extend that a little bit definitely culture eat strategy for breakfast. But what, what underpins culture is the structure of the organization quite clearly. Yeah. So where this person is at, where, wherever that may be, maybe the structure is not conducive. Experimentation. Taking any risks, even if they're calculated, all of those things. Maybe they're just simply really focused on, here's the money, here's what we want. Go get it. Right. And then this person tries to get it, It ain't work. Okay, let me give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it's not the fact that it didn't work, because certain things, especially the things that he's calling out continuous discovery, those kinds of things aren't like, you do something and a few sprints later, there's a result magically. Mm-hmm., it takes time. Cuz you're shaping the culture Yeah. Of, of the organization. Yeah. But the structure is rigid. You're not gonna be able to do that. But I like, I don't even understand I don't even understand that statement. I understand what you're saying but if somewhere, if someone were to walk up to me in the street or walk up or come up to me in a networking event, or propose in a network event if someone were to say that continuous discovery, it doesn't really work in our environment I would hear all that and it would just zip like straight through my ears. cuz I'm like, well look what doesn't work. Like you are in continuous discovery. You may be engaging your development team to help you with some of the discovery tasks and habits, right? You might be employing your whole team to do discovery. But also it might just be you and the other product managers or associate product managers or whatever you have, If you have the benefit of having people in product management, that'd be nice. Sure. To have a second person or whatever, or to be extended via BA or something like would be nice. Or have a ui ux person to help you, you know what I mean? Talk to and interview customers and do little tests and stuff like none of that requires that you actually engage the development team. I could think of a lot of stuff to do as a product manager and never even engage a development team to stay ahead of the development team. If I'm reacting poorly to this post, that's part of why is in a large part of my day to day job as a product manager, I'm doing experimentation. I'm doing tests and I'm doing research all three that potentially don't even involve the development team. And I'm doing that in order to stay well ahead of where the team is at well before the team gets there, I have been there and I know basically what it looks like. If we're climbing a mountain, and the team is like, Hey, why are we, why are we, why are we taking this path? At least I have seen the path before, even if only a couple steps in front of the team and I can say, Well, we're taking this path because, And I can give them a why. That's, Yeah, I agree. First of all, what's But that is what enables that, right? I is having enough rope to work with. If your organization says, No, you can't do that, that's just wasting money. I need the results now. And so you're always clamoring for something. You're gonna get tired pretty quickly running on a hamster wheel and you're gonna do what this guy did. It's just gonna say, Alright, not making a difference here. Yeah. I'm just gonna say yes to everybody, and therefore do a disservice to the field of PM in general. Right. Product measurement. Yeah. But, but, but he's not doing it maliciously. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying. Yeah. But he, what he's doing for, It's good for him. What's he doing with the rest of his time? Like take, taking naps and keeping himself de-stressed?. Like, what? Nothing wrong with that.. I'm a big fan of naps, but, Hey, listen, at 200 k, Yeah. I take a few naps. I don't know. Seriously. I don't know. I, I doubt that this person is doing things like, like you said experimentation, trials, all of those sorts of things. It doesn't sound like that to me. I, and, and I'm not blaming him at this stage. I'm saying maybe it's the environment he's in, maybe it's the corporate culture that restricts him from doing that? luckily that's why I'm here because I, I I'm on the blaming of this person's side of the table. Yeah, it's cool. Like, like I'm on the blaming side of the table, like Om's on the you're a terrible at coaching side of the table and I'm on the, you're terrible at being a PM side of the table. Like this is not the podcast , this is not the arguing Agile pod. This is the, the, the the Be berating Agile podcast Today. I love how in this, in this topic, when we read it, your immediate first reaction was, oh. Maybe your coaching skills aren't that great and then maybe there are other people in the organization that can help you kind of train up in those coaching skills. Have you reach out to them like, I don't see anything in here about that. or external people. Right. Go get some help. Nothing wrong with that people shouldn't feel bad about that, cuz we can't be all great at everything. This is why, this is why I feel for my career, I have such an advantage now being in product, but having a period in my career where I spent time as a scrum master slash agile coach. Yeah. Because I am aware of what should be happening in the organization for my teams, between teams. And when I'm in organizations that basically don't have scrum masters or whatever, and I'm sort of aware of who's doing that job., but I also know that these people are doing it as a side job, as a tangent kind of job. Right. They're doing it in their part-time. And I know that anybody who does this stuff part-time is, I'm not gonna say they're not going to succeed, I will just say they will never be as effective as someone who is professionally doing this job. Yeah. It's like having a part-time developer. I'm a part-time developer and a part-time, I don't know, janitor, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. It's part-time is one of those things where people say, Well, I'm gonna split my time. Yeah. This is a age old thing. We've talked about it in the past as well. 30% developing on this team and 30% on that team and all that context, switching costs and everything else. Right, Right, it, beyond all of that is that inner vesting which team are you vested with? Right. Really. Right. You know, Oh, I'm learning great skills over there, new techniques, new tools, but this is the team that really matters from an organizational standpoint. So I don't care. Right, Because I personally can benefit by learning about, I don't know, diamonds on rails, whatever the next new thing is. Ruby Pass. Ruby. Pass Ruby. So, yeah, so I, I, that whole thing about time slicing people across strategic initiatives that really matter is a, fallacy, Right? We've been saying that, but it's still prevalent out there. Let's hit a comment or two. Yeah, yeah. Let's take a look okay, so the top comment here, top comment here says I always think about it like this. There are three versions of the job. Number one, outcome driven PMs are responsible for finding the best possible solutions to deliver on outcomes. This is a. I think the most pure version of the job, because when no one is telling you what to build, you really need to do things like discovery, use data, design thinking, et cetera to find the best ideas. Number two, you're held to outcomes, but other people completely dictate what you build. Okay, so the staff, it's the second version, The stats don't match what, Okay. And then number three, your version, I think in, in parenthesis, where people just tell you what to do. So order taker pm that so is his summary of what he thinks that three different types of PMs. And then, he gives his, feedback on what he thinks is, number one, the outcome driven PM who does things based on what they believe their findings about the outcomes and their direction based on outcomes he thinks is most rewarding. Number two, he describes as hell on earth being, being held to outcomes. But then judged against basically the feelings of the whims and desires. Yeah. Yeah. Which I will, I will say like number two, he, I think he's, he's right, he's pretty dead on number two of, I've been a lot of organizations that are like, like they tried to be outcome driven with data driven, outcome driven, whatever. But when it comes to the yearly review, it's a lot of like, Mm, we heard this and, this manager thinks this and whatever. And like, not a lot of stats. Yeah. In them yearly reviews which is a whole different podcast. But number three exactly what you're saying. Not a bad way to make a paycheck if you can just accept that it's an awful way to build software, but who cares? I wanna say a couple of things about that, right? I think the guy nailed the three different types. However, I do feel like where he talks about experimentation, it isn't about the person wanting to experiment. Yeah. Right. It's about the organizational DNA allowing for that, encouraging for failures to happen. Cause when you experiment, not every experiment is a success. So what? You try something and you demonstrate what you learn from it. Yeah. That, I don't know if this person has, in whatever company they work for, I doubt it because they are now effectively to their own account, an order taker. We're at this point in the podcast where I'm starting to wonder if they're just not good at, data driven evidence based type of, I suspect they're not, if they've just been sourced in from an MBA class. Seriously. But, but I mean, I work with a lot of salespeople who are very passionate and very good. Mm-hmm. about making their cases. Hey, we need to add PDF support for, for this mobile app where this mobile app can spit out an export in the CSV and Excel and, share this file or whatever. But also we need to add pdf. Okay. Well like CSVs and Excel you can import in your system and immediately use them. PDFs can't really export and, and import into another system. Like what, why would we do PDFs? Well, the customer workflow is this and that with PDFs and this and this and that and this and that. Basically they're trying to make a sale. They're trying to leverage a feature that we don't have to try to get you to build it in order to make that sale. And the salesperson is very good at understanding the customer workflow. In order to make the sale. Yeah. Okay. The product version of that is, Okay, I, I'll pick up on that, that this, that the salesperson is operating in this sphere and start looking at other adjacent customers in that market space or maybe other customers that you could make additional sales. Should we have this functionality? Yeah. And start exploring like, Hey, here's the, here's the user interface. How much do you think this would be worth? You know what I mean? Maybe send some surveys out, maybe, maybe send some mockups up with the, with the feature there and see if customers change their mind. I don't know, like how hard is it to mock up a screen and send it to half a dozen customers? I mean, you could leverage your salesperson and their contacts to, to do that like that. Yeah. Again, none, none of what I just said. What I just said was pretty, It was pretty farfetched, right? It was pretty, pretty Meta up, pretty up in the air. However, it requires zero time from the development team. Everything I just said requires zero time from the development team. So what I'm saying is like the more I'm reading, the more we talk about this post, the more I'm suspecting like he's just not good at crafting software development style argument. Yeah. So he may be somebody who comes from a non-software environment, right? as a product person into a software environment. Because he said he is been trying for years and it hasn't worked, right? I think without really giving it, quote unquote his best shot, he seems to be somebody who says, Hey, who cares? I'm getting paid handsomely for this. I'm just gonna say, Yes sir. Yes ma'am. Right? Just be the yes man. And that's a terrible shame because you're really not helping the company you're working with mm-hmm. in the role that they've appointed you for, which is product management. Right. So what happens then, if they replace this person, which is somebody that is way less paid than 200 K, who simply says whatever order it is, I'll just entering the system. I would argue if slash when this product and or company, cuz it could be either, it could be the, the, the specific product or feature he or she maintains or it could be the company itself, assuming that like, let's just say that we've been wrong the entire time and they don't work for a FAANG company. They work for an SMB FinTech or something like that. Right. Okay. And they just, they're just overpaid basically for their position. you're absolutely right. What happens when the company or product runs into some rocky times like gonna get cut. This person's gonna get cut. If he is smart, he would jump before he gets cut, but Yeah, I know what you mean. Or if he is really, really smart, he would step aside and say timber right? Like, okay, impending doom, and then suggest something that helps, at least alleviate some of the pain and take all of the credit. I could see this person getting cut and the responsibility handed over to like a lead developer or something like that. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody, Okay. Say Junior on the pay scale, at least product management doesn't work here, is what I'm saying. Right, Right, right. Oh, that's, yeah. Product management doesn't work here. Yeah. Product management doesn't work or product management, doers of product management don't work here. I can see 'em blaming it all on uh, Scrum or Agile or whatever. Yeah. I probably don't understand what that is, but Yes, yes, they can do that. They can say, How can I possibly deliver something when I have a two week period to show something in? Right. Or you gimme three of those, but still, Yeah. You know, I really need much, much longer. Right. So it doesn't work here. Yeah, it doesn't work for us. Yeah. But there's many reasons why I could, I could easily see this one leading into product management slash Agile doesn't work here slash Scrum. Right? And I could easily see this one leading into we gotta do all the requirements up front. We gotta do all the development up front, take six months, code our thing, do a big bang deployment. We need to bring in, bring in a technical product manager. I could easily see this leading to that. Yeah. especially if this person he didn't say anything. He or she doesn't say anything about the number of teams that work for them or if they even have teams. Actually, actually now, now that I'm now thinking about it. Yeah, good point. I don't even know if they have teams. Something that I've seen with the Silicon Valley PMs is they like, they're like, Oh, I'll just partner with my engineering lead. And then basically the PM and the engineering lead talk and decide what to do. And then the engineering lead just goes back to a, a, a gaggle of developers. It says, Okay, you're gonna build this and you're gonna build this, and you're gonna build this and that. That's their, that's their method Yeah. Of development. So if they're that style of company, it doesn't strike me that any of this is outta the ordinary, actually. Not like a, if they're everything is completely in focus. If they're that style of company. Also, if they're that style of a company and you're a PM and you're getting paid 200 k oh boy, you should really be worried. Agreed. Absolutely. So now we're saying it's really the org not so much this person and his co or her competency, right? Could be. But I, I have a sneaking feeling that if that were the case, they would be some. Really close up scrutiny on what is being delivered. Mm-hmm., like people aren't gonna just simply let you work for many, many months. Right. And all you're doing is saying yes because that can only get you so far. Cuz you can't say yes to everything, so you can't possibly deliver on everything. So when you do fail, questions should be asked, I would imagine. By people higher up and say, Well, but you said or and you said, and you said, and you only delivered one of those, so it would soon come out in the wash that you are just taking orders. Unless they're very adept at blaming others all the time. Yeah, exactly. That's where, that's where I was going. I was, Yeah. Yeah. think about the culture where they don't have a team. They don't have a team. They don't go to daily scrums, they don't have refinements. They just pass everything to their engineering manager, and then the engineering manager engages the team. So now they just say, Well, the dev team failed us. Yeah. Om told me that the dev team could deliver and . So now they go to Om and it's like, Hey, Om, listen your new yearly goals are you have to deliver 90% of the features you say you're gonna commit to. You gotta deliver 'em in the sprint. So now we're gonna be judging you based off of if you committed the team committed. Did they deliver? Yeah. So we're like, that's your new OKR is my, my objective is you deliver what I say, you're gonna. And the key results is you delivered what I'm gonna say You do. We're doing OKRs now. You like, you like my you know, like my, Yeah. I, I love, I love that. Great. I love that. That's awesome. That that'll be a 15 second short right there. Hey, hey. We're go. Hey, got a great idea. Om, we're gonna do OKRs for our development. My o in the, Okay. The objective is you deliver everything I say, and the key result is, did you deliver it? Yes or no? How do you like that? Uh, yeah. Can we just do KPIs instead?? What does that mean? I don't know. I'm deflecting because obviously they're not OKRs then nothing's objective about it, right? We haven't defined what key results mean or what constitutes a result. But coming back to, the main topic here, people like this are very adept at tap dancing, corporate tap dancing, or, Walking on ice, basically. Right. You're just tiptoeing on sheets of ice. You make sure you stay airborne or, or land born float. You make sure you don't like crash through the ice. Yeah., because that is not a pleasant experience. Yeah. some people are very good at that and they, they take it to an art form and indeed make a living out of this. And it sounds like this person is doing that. Whoever you are, feel free to let us know on our podcast if you'd like to come on and talk about some of the stuff that you've posted out there. I would love to engage in a dialogue with you, I would love that. I would love it. Especially if you're buying the drinks, which you would be.