It's not a job, it's a role, one that senior developers take on all the time.

It gets turned into a job and the result is business people constantly bitching about why everything is slow and what DOES get done is never what they wanted.

The phone game is real.

It's a job of many roles and it's a crazy difficult job to do well at. I'd never do it again. Engineering feels like a cake walk in comparison.

The reason you found it so hard is because you weren't doing the implementation, which is why software developers should be taking on that role.

At that point you're a glorified translator hoping that both sides are understanding each other perfectly. And what's worse is they both speak English!

Translating between who? I don't think we share the same experiences with companies, roles etc, so we might be talking past each other.

I'm talking about the product role at silicon valley tech companies like google etc and working on enterprise products where it took a lot to understand the customers, workflows, industries etc. From your comment above maybe you think translating between eng and "business"? At the companies I'm talking about, product is "business". I'm speculating, but you might have experienced the agile heavy places with a product owner or something, planning sprints or something? That's not what I'm talking about here.

between business needs and how it gets implemented.

Companies that do this took 3 roles and smashed them into 1.

- marketing fit - business analyst (aka domain experts) - technical implementation

The reason you see people talking about how hard it is for product is because product gets to interface with the business and has an understanding of the problems and the proposed solutions. They try to tell technical to implement with no real understanding of both, due the reality of the phone game it's never implemented as they want, and they get frustrated.

The solution is to stop trying to make technical the tech equivalent of ditch diggers.

Yes, if you want a ditch dug it's relatively easy to communicate that to someone. Software aint ditches.

So while product couldn't begin to start implementing themselves, technical can absolutely be having those conversations with business.

I can see what you are saying if one is the environment you describe.

I've never worked somewhere where eng was treated like ditch diggers. But I've also never worked anywhere where this "business analyst" actually existed. If you build products for many customers there is no such person, because different customers need slightly different things and you have to pick a position v competitors.

Maybe try changing environments? Not everywhere works as you describe.

Then youve never done any real engineering lol. People who say this were often paper pushers anywhere

Most people who have done real engineering and real product jobs will tell you PM is a harder job to do well.

There is more pressure, less control, more uncertainty, more people to keep happy, more ambiguity. And the number of context switches is intolerably high for many (including me).

It is a lot easier to be a bad PM than an engineer, I'll grant you that. And most PMs aren't great.

What you mean is it's extremely difficult not to produce shit software with a setup like this, even though paradoxically the theory is that this should produce higher quality software.

The reason for this is something called tacit knowledge. The only way for a developer to be successful is if they have the same level of understanding that product does. Since they don't, product needs to be the one implementing. Since neither happens, you get shit software.

The solution is either product starts implementing or software developers stop being treated as line workers.

product used to be three roles that worked together. software dev, business analyst, and marketing. And depending on the size of the company, business analyst and marketing often means working directly with business because that's who collaborates between those two.

There is no value-add in product, the theory has proven out to be untrue.

Give it another 10-20 years and we'll be reading articles about how the "smart" companies are doing away with product and giving it back to the other roles and asking them to do something crazy like talk to each other.

"working with business" suggests we must be talking about different situations.

I'm talking about a company building software products they sell, eg an enterprise software product like salesforce, google cloud, aws, splunk etc. Not internal software or software built for a specific client.

It's all the same, someone has a need and you give them a solution.

That need is either driven by business wanting to improve the software or by technical wanting to improve the software. product doesn't belong in there.

product will never identify that a technical change will enable new things, for example. The ones who can do that aren't allowed in the conversation.

We aren't talking about the same environment.

Trying to simultaneously satisfy many customers in a market where there are multiple options, different ways to slice and dice the customer segments, different dimensions on which to optimize a product, different ways to reach customers, different systems to integrate with, it's just a whole different ballgame to building a specific solution for a specific customer.

And at somewhere like google for example, most of the PMs are former engineers and can see technical changes enabling new things. On top of that, at somewhere like Google engineers do meet with customers, frequently. There isn't some dividing line like you describe because all the business units are run by PMs or engineers. They are "business" in your terms.

It is what it is. Your observations and suggestions may well be true and sensible in the environment you are operating in.

You keep saying PM.

Yes. At most silicon valley tech companies PM = Product Manager.

Different environments.

You can have a PM without a product team, they are not the same thing.

Yep, you can structure the roles however you like. I'd guess every plausible combination has been tried.

In my world engineers are first class citizens who have real input to the product decisions and meet customers, the PMs are usually technically capable, the PM job is too big to be done part time and hence isn't. It is what it is, and doesn't seem to be close to how things work in your world. But in my world, the product job is more complex than "someone has a need and you give them a solution". For internal development or consulting, that's probably right.