Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…n. And then on top of that, if you get outside of the Silicon Valley bubble, it's even worse because they have been investing at these companies, especially the big companies in all these extra roles. I mentioned agile coaches, but scrum masters and every flavor of project manager you could dream up, they're everywhere and every kind of assistant to product people. I think it's gotten crazy. In fact, I wrote an article a long time ago, something like a decade ago that was very popular at the time called Epic Waste, and I was pointing this out and saying this is crazy. The ironic thing is that the better companies do way more with a lot less. So anyway, the roles. And then what about all the years that have been going on where they think these big companies think the answer lies in processes, especially things like safe, which outside of the Silicon Valley world is depressingly popular? And even though scrum, a lot of people don't even understand simple processes like scrum and they miss the point. So what's going on in so much of the world is they have so little in the way of outcomes to show for all this cost. And we talked about the sheer number of people becomes a problem and the amount of that cost can be shocking and the amount of waste is basically embarrassing. So it is not a surprise to me that companies are reacting to that. The bigger surprise honestly is it's taken so long for so many companies to realize what is going on. And bottom line is today I think everybody, especially outside in those big process and role heavy companies, they need to take a hard look at how they build products and how they serve their customers. And they need to look harder at how the best companies do this with so much less proportional spend and so much more real return and really take a fresh look at how to best meet the needs of their customers. That's what transformation is about, is moving to work like that. And the ones that do that well I think are the ones with the best chance to survive. I think there's just this broader trend of people just really dislike PMs in a lot of places. There's this just trend of I don't want PMs at my company, I don't want PMs at my startup. For a long time, we're going to have no PMs. It's like this general idea, and I think you're saying a lot of this comes from many people who were hired as product managers that are not good at the job and people's experience with PMs is those sorts of people. I think it's a different really answer. And I haven't gone into this, but you probably. Those examples, with very few exceptions, and I hear it all the time, almost every day, what you're describing, they're feature teams. And the truth is, and I've been saying this for a long time, the truth is they don't need PMs in a feature team. They don't because it's a project management role, Lenny, and they already have plenty of people who can cover that. And furthermore, a lot of times the engineers or the designers say, "We'd rather do it ourselves than deal with this person that's got this complex and trying to be the boss of everybody and they really don't contribute anything." So that's what's really going on in my view. They are either a delivery team or a feature team, usually a feature team in this model. And I don't blame those people for not finding value in the product manager. They are just not bringing that value. They do bring a little value, in fairness, but, and this is very brutal, but they're dramatically overpaid for the value they provide. Now on the other hand, in a real product team, that's a very different job and I don't see that. In fact, I consider that complaint you're raising as the biggest clue that they're probably our feature team. And then I'll go ask them how they're working and what that person... And then of course the first thing I ask the product manager is how do you define your job? And I bet you've heard a hundred variations of the mealy mouth, squishy, I facilitate this and I do some communication and I herd the cats and I'm listening to that going, man, I would not want to try to defend that job to the CEO.…

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