Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

"GREAT! That means we can fire the people who do the actual work, and replace them with MBA robots, who neither understand nor care about making a good product"

Pardon my pessimism, but in my whole career, I have never met a PM who actual did the work of driving the product vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling information between management, marketing, design, and engineering. Thinking that hiring more PMs would increase the output in the age of AI is such a childish fantasy.

You seem to have a deep misunderstanding of the value PM's provide. What you describe as "just" is a challenging job.

Generally, the vision is set by the founder, and it can be written down in a sentence or two. There's a ton of work trying to translate that vision into something that is coherent across engineers, customers, sales, and marketing.

Its a tragedy as its undervalued - I firmly believe apples products are significantly worse if their engineers led it. Jobs made those products

Also, in product feature teams it is up to the debate whether PMs provide any value, if you put engineers closer to customers. For the PM role to work, they need to convey customer requirements to product requirements. I have never seen a PM do a better job at this in comparison to just sending a TL to a video call with a client.

As you imply, that role is really more a director role, not a manager role. A manager managers, a director directs, including the vision and product market fit. Most Product Managers I see do not have that authority at all, and at best are constantly having to convince "leadership" like some door-to-door salesman, rather than simply updating leadership in an advise and consent format.

well, in my experience as a developer integration between different systems with different views about how things should work is often the most challenging part of the job, so what you describe sounds like it would be difficult.

Product management was interfacing with the client, understanding what is actually supposed to be built as vision, understanding UI/UX before that became a field of its own, coordinating usability sessions, and so forth.

Naturally they have common touch points like what is possible from the vision, given the actual budget and available resources, expectation management and what not.

Unless it is a team of senior folks with top skills, the team manages itself never works.

I don't know what this means. Engineers are not generally spending half their time talking to management, marketing, sales, customers, and other stakeholders.

> Also, in product feature teams it is up to the debate whether PMs provide any value, if you put engineers closer to customers. For the PM role to work, they need to convey customer requirements to product requirements. I have never seen a PM do a better job at this in comparison to just sending a TL to a video call with a client.

Great, but ten different clients want ten different product requirements, that in fact contradict each other. And it takes ten hours of calls to talk to those ten customers.

Plenty of engineers could certainly do the PM job. Many PM's come from engineering. But the point is that it's far more efficient and effective to have one person doing that, and let engineers do the engineering. That's the value. As an engineer, do you want to spend 20 hours every week talking to customers and writing feature specifications and managing a backlog? Or do you want to do, you know, engineering?

Just because you could do the PM job doesn't mean that's an efficient use of your time, or what you enjoy doing.

Project Management = Day to day to execution, logistics, resources, schedules. Scheduling meetings, sending out meeting minutes etc

Program Management = Team management towards delivering business goals/product launches on schedule

Where its tricky is the differentiation between project and program management. IMO we dont really need both terms or both roles, causes uneccessary/unnatural separation of responsibilities

As engineering becomes less expensive with generative models I can imagine efficiency tilts even further in favor of engineers doing more PM-like work.

https://jzelinskie.com/posts/p-what/

So, not in this decade?

However your experience is not wrong: they're as rare as hens' teeth.

It’s much less qualified people. Much much less.

We want PMs to understand the market, the tech, the customer, and the economic value of building a product.

We then ask them to tell us when it will be built, down to the discrete feature and function, be a technical expert for the field and engineering in the product space, ask them to convey the roadmap and timeline to customers and prospects, build reports about everything from utilization to capacity, save deals by changing timelines for “just this one feature”, participate in product marketing, and understand how their product space co-exists in the complex product offerings from a company.

“You are the Chief Product Officer for your product!” is the promise and rallying cry. That’s not an accurate description of what most PMs do and even fewer are capable of doing.

You can also argue that good devs translate requirements into code perfectly with zero bugs, but it's also a rare skill and I've never seen that.

Because in the real world, nobody's perfect. The good news is you don't need to be perfect to still add lots of value.

Demanding a standard of perfection from others, that I would hazard to guess you do not meet yourself, is rather uncharitable.

I have a couple times, but they didn't have an MBA. Unfortunately though if you have an incompetent C suite or board, it's hard to get anything meaningful done no matter how good the team under them is.

Again, wrong analogy. I don’t demand perfect analogies though. Treat this as rather charitable gesture.

Like I am saying how the current behavior of the app downright needs a big flowchart to explain and I get asked: "Add X, but keep it working for all existing users" when that means the whole freaking flowcharts needs to be redrawn from scratch. When I suggest to remove some things to make things simpler (because the users don't understand it either) I get denied because it would be too much hassle to communicate the changes.

The nice thing is no one gets inflated with a manager title they think makes them the boss of every department. You get engineering lead, production lead etc.