<story><title>B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers</title><url>https://blog.luap.info/your-b2b-startup-will-stop-innovating-the-day-you-give-power-to-product-managers.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>polote</author><text>Well I agree that this is poorly written (I wrote it).&lt;p&gt;The point of the article is not that companies shouldnt have PM, but that you shouldnt make them owner of the innovation in a B2B context. Of course if you start with the assumption of &amp;quot;Good PMs&amp;quot; it will work, but you will rarely find these &amp;quot;good PMs&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>nandorsky</author><text>This is a poorly written article that is all over the place. It’s evident the author had a horrible experience with a PM. Their description of a PM is a description of a PM who’s doing their job poorly.&lt;p&gt;Qualitative research at any company is critical and poor qual research (interviewing the wrong people, asking the wrong types of questions, etc) will yield poor insights as is the case here. Any PM working at a B2B startup not understanding the complexities of how the buyer and users differ and asking questions such as, “Would you use this feature?” is a poor PM.&lt;p&gt;Don’t let one bad experience ruin your perception of the role.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>passwordoops</author><text>100% what others are saying. This is a hot take rant with bad arguments based on an experience with a bad product manager (or maybe you&amp;#x27;re just difficult to work with and your ideas aren&amp;#x27;t as innovative or as good as you think).&lt;p&gt;I can easily flip the script and say &amp;quot;Devs at B2B shouldn&amp;#x27;t be anything more than oompah-loompahs&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;UI designers shouldn&amp;#x27;t be allowed to give ideas&amp;quot; based on a couple of my own isolated experiences.&lt;p&gt;You want to be taken seriously? Don&amp;#x27;t rant and explain what structure&amp;#x2F;methods would be more appropriate for a B2B business that would balance the need for innovation that makes users happy with keeping the paying gatekeepers willing to keep paying</text></comment>
<story><title>B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers</title><url>https://blog.luap.info/your-b2b-startup-will-stop-innovating-the-day-you-give-power-to-product-managers.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>polote</author><text>Well I agree that this is poorly written (I wrote it).&lt;p&gt;The point of the article is not that companies shouldnt have PM, but that you shouldnt make them owner of the innovation in a B2B context. Of course if you start with the assumption of &amp;quot;Good PMs&amp;quot; it will work, but you will rarely find these &amp;quot;good PMs&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>nandorsky</author><text>This is a poorly written article that is all over the place. It’s evident the author had a horrible experience with a PM. Their description of a PM is a description of a PM who’s doing their job poorly.&lt;p&gt;Qualitative research at any company is critical and poor qual research (interviewing the wrong people, asking the wrong types of questions, etc) will yield poor insights as is the case here. Any PM working at a B2B startup not understanding the complexities of how the buyer and users differ and asking questions such as, “Would you use this feature?” is a poor PM.&lt;p&gt;Don’t let one bad experience ruin your perception of the role.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>llamaLord</author><text>In this whole article the word &amp;quot;problem&amp;quot; is only written once, and it&amp;#x27;s in the line &amp;quot;the problem with product managers is&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Given you don&amp;#x27;t understand that the core pillar of the product manager role is to be the owner of the problem space, I&amp;#x27;m not sure how qualified you are to comment on how valuable our role is or isn&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;Discovery isn&amp;#x27;t about decided what does or doesn&amp;#x27;t get built, it&amp;#x27;s about discovering what the real problem is that your customers need solved (almost like it&amp;#x27;s in the name).&lt;p&gt;If your PM is good at their job, the answer to that question should be pretty clear once they&amp;#x27;re done. That&amp;#x27;s not them &amp;quot;telling you what to do&amp;quot;, if you want to go build a solution to a problem nobody actually has, you have fun with that.&lt;p&gt;And if you PM is defining solutions and telling your team how&amp;#x2F;what to build, that&amp;#x27;s on you to push back and take ownership of the part of the process that you&amp;#x27;re meant to be owning.&lt;p&gt;A lot of PM&amp;#x27;s end up overreaching because they&amp;#x27;re just tired of there being a leadership vacuum and nobody willing to fill it. Trust me, we&amp;#x27;re busy enough, we don&amp;#x27;t want the extra work.</text></comment>