Doers, Coachers and Product Managers
What do you think about the following statement?
We Need Fewer Product Managers.
John Cutler recently published an article with same title.
Later, the author clarifies:
This post has been brewing as I interact with more and more companies struggling to define (and scale) product “management” in increasingly complex organizations.
Personally I can’t agree more. We need more clearly defined roles and more doers.
Many project managers act as a middle man. Instead of empowering and training the team, enterprises create completely unreasonable and scattered roles.
Let me put my statement here:
We need more DOERS and team COACHERS.
The team should be responsible to define a work-plan, present delivery, design solution. Team must have leaders (also doers) mature enough who will make a call, whenever it’s needed, for training and quality assurance.
Product managers, trying to fully manage the teams, yield less quality than self organized teams because even a good listener (good manager) will not be able to coordinate all the small things that go into a great product. But every domain specialist can contribute a work with high sense of quality.
This doesn’t mean that we don’t need product owners and representatives. We do. And let me state it: we need well qualified, well structurized product owners. We need people who will take care about requirements and a lean knowledge transfer between stakeholders. But we can’t magically make a work done with amorphous product managers nor focusing on the management side rather than doing side.
