Ever worked for a company that made ridiculous decisions but was still a nice place to work? For me it was Dodge Group. Beautiful office with great people where I could eat my lunch by the side of the Thames. Watching boats and dangling my feet over the water in Kingston.
I was employed as a coder but it was actually my first experience of Product Management. I went out and met customers. I prioritise the incoming asks. I got to devise solutions and think about the future of the product.
Those days are gone, for me, the company, and, if we believe the AI hype, Coders and Product Managers too.
Product Managers who code
I always advise against having hybrid Coder/Product Managers but the idea keeps resurfacing. Especially in current discussions of LLMs and AI. You can see the attraction: no need for a Product Manager to explain the ask to a Coder, no time wasted talking, no miscommunication and one vision of how it should work. Like me at Dodge.
Then for the company: no Coder means no wage costs. No bolshie programmer attitude. No failure to understand business needs or lack of appreciation for customers. Sweetness and light as ideas move directly from the Product Manager’s mind into code, into customers hands and money comes back.
A few weeks ago I got to talk this over with Peter Hilton, another coder turned Product Manager. I said I felt the desire to have managers code reflected the low status of engineers in the UK. Managers were happier with other managers and not dirty engineers with code under their finger nails. Peter saw the opposite: he saw the engineer hero worship of Silicon Valley trying to ordain everyone a coder.
The killer question for me is: what does the product manager do if they get a spare hour or two?
Underlying the belief that spare Product Manager hours should be spent coding (with or without an AI) is the assumption that there is not enough code and not enough features. More features means more sales. This immediately starts to smell like a feature factory.
Is lack of code the real problem?
I’ve always believe that a Product Manager with spare time should pick up the phone and speak to a customer. Or go and read market research, analyse incoming feature requests and support calls. Review strategy. Speak to stakeholders.
A Product Manager does not add value by building product. They add value by multiplying the value of the work done by builders. Making sure the highest value items are worked on. That the product-market fit is right. That customers are getting the expected benefits. And that everyone knows the strategy so the construction work is focused.
Today we are constantly told that AI makes Coders more productive. Thousands of lines of code can be written in a fraction of the time. Economically that means that the cost of code is less: AI makes code cheap. That might justify paying the Coders less but it means the multiplier is more important.
Why would Product Managers stop doing the high value work of strategy, customers and prioritisation to do the low value work of coding? It doesn’t make sense. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.
At the same time some people are questioning why we need Product Managers at all. Why not just ask the LLM “What features should my app have?” But, if you can ask an LLM so can your competition. An LLM might be a short cut to a quick Product decision but while it delivers an instant fix it has no longevity. If you find yourself playing feature poker you need to change the game.
Competitive advantage
To gain competitive advantage your Product Managers need to find new insights which are not in an LLM. This might be from doing things LLMs can’t do, like visiting customers, watching them, talking to them, understanding their intent. Or looking at data which is not available to an LLM – feature requests coming from existing customers, talking to sales people about failed sales, or analysing your own data.
In fact, because LLMs make research from public sources easier and cheaper, it becomes more important to find things that your competitors can’t find. When you have a product in the market existing customers should be a goldmine of information.
Additionally, in a world were it is cheap and easy to identify and add functionality then products are going to become crowded and less usable. Deciding what to leave out becomes more important.
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Picture copyright Robert Cook