Kevin Yien: belief

Transcript context

…I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust. Christina, thank you for joining us. If you want to learn more, head on over to oneschema.co. That's oneschema.co. Every PM has their definition of what is product management, and I have one that I'm trying to find exactly what I wrote, but essentially, it's to marshal the resources of your team to solve customer problems and drive business impact most efficiently, something like that. And I feel like it's very aligned with your perspective, but I really love this view of it's unlocking the potential energy of the team. Not just marshaling the resources of a team, but it's there, and your job is to maximize their effort. And this is why when people say, "I hate product managers. I don't want any product managers at my team. We don't need product managers here," I feel like that's often because you've had a bad PM. Good PMs make you better and make your life better, allow you to do the work you want to do and they take all the stuff you don't want to do, make sure the stuff you're doing is worthwhile. Is there anything more you want to add along those lines? To elaborate on that, I think the broader point is that truly not every team needs a product manager, but the activities, the outcome that one would drive needs to get done no matter what. And in some cases, this is why the prototypical companies that everyone references when they say, "They never had product managers, look at how successful they are," they're all building for themselves. Stripe, Twilio, Figma, designers for designers, engineers for engineers. When you are the customer, why the heck do you need someone else to help do the things that let you make decisions on what to build? But if you are not the customer, if you're working in a particularly complex space, if there's something that you, as the person that could build the product, feel you don't have, that's when you can essentially delegate that responsibility to someone else to say, "Hey, let me do the things I'm really good at and you do something that I need to get my job done." So it's that sort of relationship that I think is often missing in the discourse. I think it would alleviate a lot of the, "We don't want PMs. PM is useless" or, "PM's one of the best thing since [inaudible 00:09:52]," which they're not. It's just a manifestation of that problem. Yeah. Just to build on that, we're going on a tangent, but I think that's really interesting. I think there's another element of that, SNAP actually is another example where they waited, I think, until they had 200 people before they hired their first PM. To me, that's an example of other people were doing the PM job. As you said, there's PM activity, someone's doing them, lining people, prioritizing, making sure things are clear, making sure people aren't surprised, all these things PMs do. Someone's doing that, and my feeling is like, "Okay, your designers may love doing that, great. Let them do it." If your engineers that have a lot of product sense may want to do that, great. But there's some point they either is like, "Forget it. I just want to code. I want to build that. I want to be sitting around in meetings all day," or they just aren't as good as things are scaling. And so it's kind of like, if your engineers, designers want to do it and are good at it, great. You don't need PMs for a long time. Oftentimes they're not good at it or they don't want to be sitting in doing all these PM things.…

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