Product Manager

“And I see some other companies that are around our size starting to go hire a PM or a marketer or something like that. And that just feels like the old way of building a software business. And ultimately that's gonna lead to something where 10% of the people a…”

“In a world where every story gets told, every product story gets told, every feature gets tried, I think a lot of PMs are going to realize they're actually not that good at zero to one. And it's much more fulfilling to work on someone else's good idea than you…”

“I mean, just ship something once a week and it doesn't have to be crazy.”

“I do still think that, and maybe this is thinking about it from like a slightly larger company perspective, but I think you do still need people that have certain responsibilities, right? Because if you have one person that's expected to design, to rally a tea…”

“Just the whole organization layer, which a lot of product managers historically did, should not be human.”

“There are people who understand customer problems, People who have taste and people who understand the jagged edge of AI capabilities and are curious about it. And like, those are the three things. If you've got those three, if you're going to be, if you don't…”

“Wherever possible, it's kind of optimal to not have a product manager and instead have design and engineering going through those kinds of steps and making sure that their muscles are well repped.”

“If you talk to most engineers or even designers, they will remember the great PMs that they've worked with mostly because they've worked with so many bad ones.”

“Hiring so many PMs infantilizers The engineers and the designers who are perfectly capable of making good decisions, but just never had to, because there was always a PM to babysit them.”

“Rather than mapping PMs to teams where you kind of assume that the PM will always do that, we tend to map them to kind of problems or kind of like core projects. And that means that there will be a year more where there isn't a PM attached to a particular engi…”

“We've just passed 20 PMs. We have kind of, I think, 21, 22 PMs in the building today, which for those following what our trajectory is, is pretty small considering the volume of GMV that our sellers move.”

“Folks who spend a lot of the time in their interviews talking about those like alignment meetings and driving alignment and stakeholder management and those pieces, because There's definitely a group of PMs and I certainly used to be one of them earlier in my …”

“I think fundamentally, you didn't ask me this, but there is this question in the community of, do we still need PMs when the models are still capable, when engineers are leaning in I think the role of people who are user centric, who go into the details of und…”

“I have found that PMs, designers, data scientists are able to get farther in the product development life cycle before engineering really needs to be front of the line in unlocking things than was true a couple years ago.”

“Data scientists are still going to be experts at Can we trust this data? Are we interpreting it the right way? What's the data versus judgment that we should be applying here? A product manager is still going to be exceptional at saying, have we really framed …”

“In fact, you build the evals before you build the app. That kind of becomes, that's why people say that, hey, evals is the new weapon for product managers because they are the ones who are defining the app's behavior.”

“Good written culture and no public managers. I was always bearish from the role and now more so. I don't think you need a conduit of information anymore. And, you know, I think engineers should work with customers and yeah, if someone has good design standards…”

“Like now, not only engineers with, we also have designers, PMs, everybody on the Clark code team checks in code.”

“PM are no longer bottlenecked of if they have an idea waiting on engineering bandwidth.”

“PEMs can prototype super, super fast. Which is really, really great because that means you can front load a lot of the work. So like a PM can start hyper long before once he or she has the, you know, smallest inkling of an idea that we might want to do this. T…”

“I think it bifurcates the skills a little bit. So the things that made a really good product manager, a good product manager then are only amplified. So deep understanding of the customer, ability to articulate your ideas to a team with varied skills. AI only …”

“There's no product managers in industrial design. Like, you are the PM. There's industrial designers, and there's engineers. And there's program managers. So the designer is the product manager. So a design product is one function.”

“And I generally encourage them to not use the GUIs. And I encourage them to use the tweets because I just know that over time they're going to be curious and like pull at other threads. And one day they wake up and they're like, Oh, I understand more of the su…”

“If you look at the traditional tech org, org structure, you know, designers really are producing visuals. They're not really producing the product direction or the strategy or the vision or, you know, net new That new innovation, right? They're really responsi…”

“In the early days, my view was not that we don't need PMs. My view is that designers should do that work. So that's essentially you know, what we would say to our designers, which was like, you know Hey, if you need PM support, why don't you just do it yoursel…”

“And what we've noticed is that people that are getting the most value out of our product, Tend to be the more tech-adjacent ones. Maybe people, product managers have written code many years ago, but don't worry about the development environment setup. Don't wa…”

“We have this list of team principles, and this includes who our key users are, why those are our key users. And the reason that we articulate all of this is so that everybody on the team feels like they understand how our business works. They understand what's…”

“I think all of the roles are merging. PMs are doing some engineering work, engineers are doing PM work, designers are PMing and also landing code.”

“And actually almost all the PMs on our team have either been engineers or ship code here on code code.”

“Now what we're essentially saying is the information mover is essentially going to become a dinosaur. And I think about half of the product people that were kind of, that grew into the industry, you know, have that skill and superpower.”

“I think that if you have an engineering team of 50 people building things for your customers and you're like, Hey, I want to be the 51st because that's how I get leveraged. I'm like, eh, it's kind of a cheap knockoff of an engineer.”

“Your brands don't matter as much as how modern you are in your ability to deliver product. In, in the past, I think for the last 10 years, it's like, have you seen the movie before? ... But now if every way of building software and how we deliver product is co…”

“My prediction is the vast majority of people that are listening to this will be in a different job in the next five years, because they will either choose to move to something. Because they will, that company will struggle to stay modern. Just like we're descr…”

“One of the things I love most about Claw Design, funny enough, as a first reaction, is doing the questionnaires. Because in doing the questionnaires, I, as like the product manager, can get so much more clear as to what exactly I'm building. Of course, I grabb…”

“If you are designing something, you need to make sure, is it going to help me sell? And if it is helping sell, does it expand? Does it expand? Does it cross sell? If it cross sell, does it upsell? A product manager who doesn't think that way is useless in toda…”

“They have not let PMs provide like PowerPoint or keynote presentations on product for like two years. Every presentation on product has to be a workable demo, and they just expect the PMs to create the products, and the execs just refuse to look at static, you…”

“I think the black pill is I don't think most PMs know how to do that. In fact, many companies have zero people that know how to do that at all in any function.”

“My hot take is that like, I feel like if you're actually unemployed, like you probably have more time to be a builder and like to be innovative. Because you can actually, like, play all this stuff and, like, learn all this stuff while the PMs are trying to.”

“I think that that, that one is, is going to mean that, like, in my eyes, the work with PMs is, like, not going away, actually, and anytime soon, and that, that piece, especially for larger projects, you don't need to do as much of it for smaller stuff, right? …”

“In this world of engineers are mini PMs that the engineer who is like highly product minded is a unicorn is an absolute unicorn. I think the same thing is true for PMs where it's like, okay, now, you know, this, in this ratio of the designers really stressed a…”

“The other thing I always tell people I've managed is it's your fault if the leaders didn't buy into your idea. Like it's not, you can't just be like, ah, they never, they just don't see it. It's not my fault. They agreed to do something else. I always tell the…”

“If you don't respect that person, if you don't believe they know something you don't, you need to quit. You need to go work somewhere else.”

“I think that we are entering a golden age of product management, not of product managers, but of product management and the core skills that made this function the thing that I love to do.”

“There's definitely product managers who I think they're, they don't know enough about the technical side, which can be fine, but like can't really appreciate the pain engineering is going through and like what on call is like because like they've never really …”

“Good product managers, I think, are not compensated for writing good PRDs. They're compensated, again, for good judgment, right? Somebody else can do the writing. You, as somebody who directs and builds this product, you need to know, again, what, what's gonna…”

“Earlier, there was nothing called the prototyping interview. Now, there's explicit interview in the interview loop called prototyping. It literally forces product managers to be hands-on.”

“The number of designers and product managers related to the number of engineers, when I was growing up in product, it used to be, one to three or one to 10. It's going to one to 20 now.”

“In fact, Jack called the product manager role product editor. Why? Because he believed rightly so that the role of the product manager is not to add more features. Any of us can look at a product and say, here's 10 things you should build. The best designers, …”

“I think titles are going to collapse and responsibilities are going to collapse and everyone's just going to be building.”

“The AI lifecycle both Pre-deployment and post-deployment is very different as compared to a traditional software life cycle. And so, so a lot of old contracts and handoffs between traditional roles, like say PMs and engineers and data folks has now been broken…”

“Every time you see a bug, every time you see a bug, not most of the time, every time you go and you drop it at the feet of the product manager or the engineering manager, every time. In public, preferably.”

“I see vibe coding As a skill being added to a lot of job descriptions for designers, for product managers for marketers, which I think is a really interesting shift.”

“Gone are the days where a product manager is just writing a spec and sort of giving a set of instructions or requirements for somebody else to go build, like a product manager necessarily now can be empowered to generate an app and get it to 40, 50 in some cas…”

“We've seen like a massive surge of product manager, product managers and designers getting interested in participating in the eval process among our customers.”

“The litmus test I have always given my sales team is if you are an account executive in my org and I put you in front of 10 engineers at our company, it should take them 10 minutes to figure out you aren't a product manager.”

“We are, we don't have a product manager. We've trained a bot in product analytics and is able to do everything from PRD, BRDs to PRDs to everything through the line, right?”

“I also don't think you will need a designer for all things. Like so much of this is going to just come from vibe coding and vibe designing. I think many of the surfaces that you have a designer's waste their time on today can be done just as well by a product …”

“I don't like the thing like PMs are the CEOs of their teams because I think PMs serve the context they're in and their job is to keep a team aligned to the direction of the company.”

“They need, they have so many product managers, they're hiring all the product people, and then you give them things to do, or they get sad, and so you end up doing more things because you've hired all the people, and you can't have them do nothing, and they al…”

“Traditionally you've got solutions engineers, you've got customer success staff, sales, AE, they talk to customers. Maybe the SE here is a good idea. They communicate that to a product manager. Product manager talks to the engineering manager about that. Maybe…”