In your company, product managers are a part of?
There are 2 types of companies
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PMs under Business Team - Product Managers do real work, are responsible for P&L and growth. Common in startups.
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PMs under Tech Team - Only technical implementation work. Not responsible for P&L or growth. This is a common occurrence in MNCs. They actually hinder growth as they have no incentive to build more features or products. They only build what upper management wants i.e. what gets them their appraisal.
Product team is simply a useless political tool. Fortunately some PMs in there strive hard to drive success, but in doing so they effectively just manage tech teams to build output. If that's what they were meant to do then an EM is what was needed not PM.
I find it quite silly, they should just be customer's voice, a manager is not the right term for them.. should be something else.
Why would they be responsible for PnL of product when they neither have knowledge or stake in building or maintaining product? And they are not business to build strategy either. Just a waste of space and of late I have found that it's mostly a political tool to poke the established good business teams. I smell too much jealousy among PMs when tech teams directly interface with business... It's such a shame
Sad to hear your experience. I am a PM, regardless of what the role should be called, I think the work is under -rated. It totally depends from person to person. The sad thing about PM roles are the useless course which are directly teaching fancy words but nothing about problem solving, I don’t think PM can be taught in 6-week course or via projects. It takes time and the role is ambiguous in every company.
Particularly the role might be a tool, as you mentioned, but this is more around having people talk to customers and discuss with business and engineering on how to effectively solve a customer problem using less iterations and achieving business objective. This according to my experience till now is the fundamental JD.
Regarding jealousy is something which depends on people again. I have also seen EMs getting jealous if execs directly get involved with a member of their team to get a small thing done quickly to resolve matter. Many such examples in multiple teams could be there, entirely depending on the type of person involved.
A senior getting jealous when someone directly talks to his junior bypassing him is same as tech talking to business bypassing PMs? Such insanely wrong opinions of PM role! Removing customer needs part there is no role that PM brings in on top of existing business and tech teams. If there is any such, then that's just a political cluster fck. And in any org this nuance of being a strong representation of customer's voice has limited need. So hiring know nothing college grads in bulk is nothing but a political spear by a section against business that's it..
This is the red flag if PMs are not responsible for driving P&L/growth.
Most product based companies have Product Management in TPM division - the Product head or GM drives both P&L and features
