Why Product Management is Broken and How to Fix It | Anton Zaides

In this SPECIAL Substack Week episode, we dive deep into the current state of product management with Anton Zaides, a seasoned software engineer and leader. Anton shares his perspectives on why product management is fundamentally broken and offers practical solutions for organizations looking to improve their product development processes.

"I started to search for content from other engineering managers and focused on practical insights."

Anton's journey spans 15 years in software engineering, from game development to DevOps and scaling startups. His transition to leadership revealed a gap in practical leadership content, which inspired him to start sharing his own experiences. Drawing from his four years as an engineering leader in a startup, Anton noticed patterns in product management that needed addressing, leading to his viral article on the topic.

"My team was working on a feature, that got canceled the day after it was released."

Product management faces several critical challenges in today's technology landscape. Anton identifies key issues including the development of unused features, increasing software complexity, and misaligned incentives that discourage innovation. Through his conversations with industry professionals, he discovered these problems were widespread, with teams frequently building features that get canceled or go unused. Despite following Agile methodologies, many organizations fail to properly evaluate feature impact, leading to wasted resources and frustrated teams.

"The PM spent only 5% of his time on talking to customers."

One of the core issues Anton identifies is the transformation of product managers into glorified program managers. In many organizations, product managers spend most of their time managing JIRA tickets and dependencies rather than engaging with customers and driving innovation. The pressure to deliver on predetermined roadmaps, often dictated by executive teams, leaves little room for challenging assumptions or testing ideas with minimal scope. This shift away from customer interaction and strategic thinking has reduced the product manager's role to primarily managing internal processes.

"PM's should be like a founder for the product business."

To improve product management, Anton advocates for several key changes:

• Offloading program management responsibilities to the team

• Trusting product managers to make strategic decisions

• Requiring specific industry knowledge and experience

• Encouraging face-to-face customer interactions

• Moving product managers closer to commercial roles

• Involving engineers in customer conversations

"The more links you have in the communication chain, the worse the information gets communicated."

Anton proposes a shift towards a more functional organizational structure where Product and Engineering work together more closely. He emphasizes the importance of direct communication between technical teams and customers, warning against over-reliance on data alone. The solution involves bringing everyone closer to the business side and creating stronger networks between organizations and engineers.

"Get engineers to visit customers."

Key recommendations for improving product management include:

• Involving engineers in customer and sales conversations

• Giving engineers visibility through release messaging and communications

• Establishing strong collaboration between engineering leaders and product managers

• Ensuring product managers have deep domain expertise

• Creating opportunities for direct customer interaction

• Treating product managers as business owners rather than project managers

• Anton’s Article that we review in this interview: “Product Management is broken, a change is coming” 

• John Cutle’s article on Product Manager’s Responsibilities 

• Anton’s Article on how to work effectively with your Product Managers

• A book recommendation: Empowered by Marty Cagan

• An episode of Lenny's podcast with Brian Chesky

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About Anton Zaides 

Anton Zaides is a seasoned software engineer and leader with 15 years of experience. From game development in Unity3D to leading DevOps and scaling startups, Anton's journey is marked by rapid growth. In 2023, he began sharing insights for engineering managers, amassing 15k newsletter subscribers in under a year. He writes a newsletter called "Leading Developers" that provides practical insights for engineering managers.

You can link with Anton Zaides on Substack.