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Search - "product manager"
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Be more passive
I always get involved in everything, at every company. Not to further my career through ass-kissing and overperforming.
I regularly piss off people. When C-level has a discussion about strategy, I'm usually ahead of them, ask too many questions, criticize every detail they've missed, cause frustration by making them look incompetent.
Can't help it, when I see retards destroy a great product I have to intervene.
Some people appreciate it. I often defend both devs and end users, when others don't dare speak up.
But fuck it, I'm getting older. I'm gonna coast a bit more. Sit back, relax.
If a product manager doesn't prepare enough tasks — that's cool, I still have a Factorio savegame to work on.
If another team designs an incredibly stupid feature — they'll discover the issues eventually by themselves. Maybe I'll warn once, just to be nice.
*Pours another chocolate milk*
Also gonna spend at least 4h/d with my daughter. She's a better human than most of my coworkers, and the work we do using her Legos is honestly more important for humanity than the Jira backlog.20 -
The Manager kept masturbating over "low hanging fruit".
The apples on the bottom of The Product have all been picked.
The apples at the top are starting to rot.
The Manager masturbated a bit more over the low hanging fruit.
The bottom of The Product is now so slippery with Manager Cum that the brave engineers can't reach the top anymore.
Time to bring my axe to work.13 -
While writing up this quarter's performance review, I re-read last quarter's goals, and found one my boss edited and added a minimum to: "Release more features that customers want and enjoy using, prioritized by product; minimum 4 product feature/bug tickets this quarter."
... they then proceeded to give me, not four+ product tickets, but: three security tickets (two of which are big projects), a frontend ticket that should have been assigned to the designer, and a slow query performance ticket -- on top of my existing security tickets from Q3.
How the fuck was I supposed to meet this requirement if I wasn't given any product tickets? What, finish the monster tickets in a week instead of a month or more each and beg for new product tickets from the product manager who refuses to even talk to me?
Fuck these people, seriously.8 -
Manager: I want the front ends to be more dumb, too much logic is happening on the frontend.
Me: both of the sites are just multi step forms, I’m confused about the complexity part.
Manager: yea but don’t we have a bunch of third party api calls?
Me: we have 4 and they are public facing apis.
Manager: yea, make a new api and move this api calls to the backend and I want both frontend teams to send the same shape payload.
Me: but…
Manager: oh and I don’t like how the business team does the a/b testing and splitting traffic, let’s move that to the backend as well.
Me: but… that a/b testing platform they use in ran by another team and they have a full set of features for business analytics…
Manager: yea let’s just replicate those features and move them to the backend.
Me: but it’s a product!
Manager: look! You are the best backend engineer we got! I know you can do this!
Me: I lead the frontend teams…
Manager: ….
Manger: good news we are giving you a promotion with raise you are now a senior engineer.
Me: I confused but happy… I think..9 -
Post after a long long time...
Wanted to reply to so many comments and mentions, rant about a bunch of topics, do a face reveal after I went for a vacation with family and got some pictures, update y'all on my job hunt, but was busy like hell.
Anyway, time for a story.
After my rejection with Meta and Booking, I started preparing like crazy and my interviews started going well. Refined my LinkedIn further and recruiters started reaching out as well.
Over time, with efforts and feedback, I was able to build a good pipeline.
One of my dream companies reached out to me and I got hired in just 1 round and all others were merely a formality. I was euphoric, but at the same time didn't get over excited as this seemed fishy.
They made a very good monetary offer and I didn't talk to my manager yet regarding resignation. They are pushing me for an early joining.
Read a bunch of Glassdoor reviews and also spoke to a friend who just recently quit that organisation.
He confirmed that the company has 3 months of notice, has sandwich leave policy, and some other XLT political mess.
I decided to decline the offer tomorrow.
Day saved? Not yet.
Because of this I slacked off work a lot. I am super screwed with work items pending because I thought I'd quit.
My boss resinged and new one isn't that supportive yet. He is trying to change everything overnight. Typical.
I ended up performing poorly in other companies because I was confident I'll pick this offer and didn't prepare for upcoming good companies.
Moreover, we have our offices opening up from April and I might be asked to relocate to another city which does not have a team but just because it is on paper, they might force me to be in office 50% of the time.
And what's worse is, my relationship with tech is deteriorating and they are putting the entire product team in bad light.
I have a planned weekend trip coming up, so I won't be able to prepare for interviews or work on case studies so that shit will pile up more.
I am sooooo fucking screwed. Life was stable and then all of a sudden too 180° flip.
I am hysterical right now.17 -
I built our slack bot messages so that they are prefixed in BIG LETTERS with whatever system they originate from, i.e.:
"DEVELOP: You are a useless product manager"
"STAGING: You are a useless product manager"
"PRODUCTION: You are a useless product manager"
One of these is when a payment is made on our platform. Our lovely product manager proceeds to message me, "did you just trigger a payment in the test system?".
YES, OBVIOUSLY I DID SEEING AS THE MESSAGE HAS THE GIANT WORD "STAGING" IN FRONT OF IT!!!
https://lmgtfy.app/?q=how+to+read1 -
Another day, another shitty set of JIRA tickets.
In this week's edition, we run into an issue you'd think is a meme, something you couldn't even make up: three tickets with IDENTICAL titles, but miraculously, they actually refer to three DIFFERENT tasks! (Also comical, they're not bugs, they're tasks, but mouth breathers don't really know the difference, and at this point I just don't have the energy to attempt to explain what could be explained to elementary school children.)
I present a rare look into our national archives!
This document features two exhibits:
Exhibit A: product owner's original ticket titles
Exhibit B: translated-into-competency-because-i'm-not-mentally-deficient ticket titles
Just more proof that 'product owners' don't own shit, the devs are the real ones who actually know what is going on.
I mean just LOOK at Exhibit A's titles. As a big smart manager, do you write those tickets, smile, and say to yourself "Ah, yep, that's very clear, I'll definitely remember what each of these mean literally 5 seconds from now!"
Is asking for literally 30 seconds more of thought too much to ask for? Apparently.
Just kill me
Happy friday ☠️7 -
Fuck product managers.
Just the other day I was discussing our progress so far and this product manager shows us the timeline and his vision for the project.
Ngl, I haven’t seen such an ambitious fuck for so long. He doesn’t know how to do anything other than fucking spreadsheets. The only problem with his plan is that we don’t even have the team, just 2 pity devs carrying it.
I still don’t get it, why the fuck would a company with 2 devs need a product manager?2 -
Government re-employment resume wizard: "Enter your job title for this job experience."
Me: "Development Manager"
Wizard: "Did you mean Biofuels/Biodiesel Technology and Product Development Manager,
Training and Development Manager, or
Wind Energy Development Manager?"
Me: "Web Development Manager"
Wizard: "Website Administrator it is!"
Me: ... bruh ...7 -
We had only one product UX designer in our team.
She quit and I habe accelerated my job hunt.
And when I quit too, the tech team will collapse with both of us gone.
Because then there will be no product manager and no designer, only tech who is arrogant and cocky to even built a simple button to refresh the fucking page.
God bless with this fucking tech team. The Tech Senior leadership is shit. They deserve it, but for now, it's us who are facing challanges.2 -
I took a job with a software company to manage their product, which was a SaaS property maintenance system for real estate, social housing, etc.
There was no charge to real estate agents to use it but maintenance contractors had to use credits to take a job, which they pre-purchased. They recharged their credit costs back to the real estate agent on their invoice).
Whether this pricing model is good or not, that's what it was. So, in I came, and one of the first things management wanted me to deal with was a long-standing problem where nobody in the company ever considered a contractor's credits could go into the negative. That is, they bought some credits once, then kept taking jobs (and getting the real estate agent to pay for the credits), and went into negative credits, never paying another cent to this software company.
So, I worked with product and sales and finance and the developers to create a series of stories to help get contractors' back into positive credits with some incentives, and most certainly preventing anyone getting negative again.
The code was all tested, all was good, and this was the whole sprint. We released it ...
... and then suddenly real estate agents were complaining reminders to inspect properties were being missed and all sorts of other date-related events were screwed up.
I couldn't understand how this happened. I spoke with the software manager and he said he added a couple of other pieces of code into the release.
In particular, the year prior someone complained a date on a report was too squished and suggested a two-digit year be used. Some atrocious software developer worked on it who, quite seriously, didn't simply change the formatting of that one report. No, he modified the code everywhere to literally store two-digit years in the database. This code sat unreleased for a year and then .... for no perceivable reason, the moron software manager decided he'd throw it into this sprint without telling me or anybody else, or without it being tested.
I told him to rollback but he said he'd already had developers fixing the problems as they came up. He seemed to be confident they'd sort it out soon.
Yet, as the day went on more and more issues arose. I spoke to him with the rest of the management team and said we need to revert the code but he said they couldn't because they hadn't been making pull requests that were exclusive to specific tickets but instead contained lots of work all in one. He didn't think they could detangle it and said the only way to fix was "play whack-a-mole" when issues came up.
I only stayed in that company for three months; there was simply way too much shit to fix and to this day I still have no idea the reasoning that went on in the head of anyone involved with that piece of code.2 -
Product manager: When building new features, we find we have bugs that reappear in other parts of the app where the bug was solved before. We have to find a solution to this issue.
Dev: These are called regressions, they happen all the time in software development.
Product manager: ...
Dev: Fuck outta here! Its friday!3 -
Go assign a super simple ticket to your "product owner" or "manager" or whoever the hell claims they "work so hard" and "have the vision" or whatever blah blah blah when in reality YOU'RE the one working 12 hour days, completing the features used by THOUSANDS.
Just try it. They'll never complete it. I guarantee it. Here I am looking at one that is three weeks old asking to update the f&*(@#$ credit card credentials for a simple log service to be reactivated.
So sick of this backward world where us devs never get any credit.
Who wants to start a software union with me?2 -
Update about my boss:
I was early too judge. Maybe still early to form an opinion.
But dude seems pretty level headed. Yes, he is agressive. Yes, he has weird way of complicating things.
But I got to learn things from him. I earned his trust, just like I did in the past with other managers. He is confident about my performance now. He gave me space to ramp up and pushed me to limits.
But now, Floyd is settled. Maybe with time, I might get occasional unpleasant interactions, but those are part of every job.
However, we as a society decided to be in agile mode. Fix a problem and the solution gives rise to another one.
The business head of my pod is going crazy over the deliverables.
They were surviving for years with a product manager. Everything was driven by tech without any research.
And now when I am in, they want everything to be done yesterday.
We spent some decent amount of time on strategy and it turned out to be good. Now they are questioning that why ain't I delivering?!
It's been a week we finalised the strategy, let me get some space and time to structure and plan the execution.
Business heads are pretty nice and level headed people. Just that I don't understand the sense of urgency. I get it that my pod often has to deal with fire fighting given the nature of the business, but holy fuck! Stop pressurising to deliver everything together on a war foot.
They are like, we'll ask for more resources. But whose gonna tell them that 9 women cannot deliver a baby in 1 month.
I need time for discovery and research. Without that, don't expect impact.
As the only PM space, leading the entire vertical, how can I even focus on multiple initiatives?
I really miss my previous life of my first company. It's exactly an year when I left them and I changed two companies since then.
My learning and earnings sky rocketed, but WLB took a toll.
I miss the time when I could finish my work in an hour and did whatever the fuck I want while at work like browsing new topics to learn, exploring places, attending events, connecting with people, making social posts to learn, finance as a hobby, yada yada..
These days, I feel too burned out. Not that I am worried about job stability, because I trust my skills.
But more due to the fact that I have to constantly focus on work for the time I am in office. No free space or time to collect myself together, process things, and focus.
This leads me to thinking about work (read processing office discussions), at home too.
I cannot enjoy music. Feels like a load.
I no longer attend events or meet people after work. No more wasting time on the internet.
And most importantly, I am not bored anymore. I miss being bored. I miss living a boring, mediocre lifestyle.
I miss doing my side projects and polishing my portfolio site ten times a day, because I got nothing better to do.
I used to spend time learning right grammar and why American and English words are different and which to use where.
I miss spending time of Google Maps exploring borders and remote regions.
Weekends fly by. No hobby to pursue. No free time.
I miss the days when I had nothing to do and I was bored and I could do anything.
I used to be always happy. Because no responsibilities. I used to be always up for a meetup. I used to be available for a phone call.
Now it's nothing but work which is surely exciting and some foundational learning with good enough money, but I miss my time when I used to get bored because I had nothing to do.5 -
I maintain two websites for my employer. The head of my department and my manager decided it’s best for me to focus my time on website A and website B should be replatformed to an out of the box solution. For website B, we’d work with our IT team to find something suitable.
I did some research and came up with a list of possible solutions. IT looked into solutions that would work with the org’s best practices for tech. A few sales pitches and demos were arranged with the top choices.
Stakeholder for website B is really digging in her heels. SH keeps badgering our Product Manager and IT about why can’t we just build in-house. The out of box solutions don’t do everything she wants.
PM tells SH that no solution will be perfect. PM also reminds SH that comparable institutions just use Google sheets/forms and do everything by hand. So choose an out of the box platform or use Google forms.
Plus, the list of improvements the SH wanted for website B would take at least a year if I did them on my own and there’s no budget to out source the labor. That’s not counting bring the code up to best practices or improving database efficiency.
I’m glad I don’t have to work with Stakeholder anymore. SH and her department were just a pain. They want a lot of custom tech solutions but they freak out at the smallest talk about tech issues. -
Product manager keeps fucking with my Jira board, changing names of tickets that he's not even the reporter of and none of his names make any sense. I keep thinking my tickets have disappeared. He doesn't understand how Jira works and confuses the shit out of me.4
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One day, the Director of Web Ops (marketing role) submitted a ticket to update the list of product categories on the website’s navigation. Sounds like a simple ticket right? Just some html edits. Nope. Every day for three days, she changes her mind and adds new changes. What should have taken me 10 minutes stretched out to three days. She held up code review of my ticket because she kept making changes.
She had plenty of time to sort out what she wanted. That ticket had been sitting in the To Do pile for two days before I touched it.
She was being an asshole because she knew she could get away with it and I had no recourse: my direct manager was on vacation, the entire dev team was going to be laid off anyway so no one was going to defend us on “trivial” matters, and we were going to enter code freeze soon so she’d just argue it was critical business changes for our critical revenue season.
I suspect she was also just not good at her job. I never met her in person because she was hired during the 2020 pandemic and we were all working remotely. I did see her make a five minute presentation during an all staff meeting…and she didn’t come off too well. Her voice was trembling during her turn to speak…like she was not confident or not prepared.
She knew she was causing chaos but she put on this act of not knowing. She was definitely trained on our dev team’s practices for tickets and deployments. She knows about code review, beta testing, and user acceptance testing that has to happen before a ticket can be deployed.
It happened to be before Thanksgiving weekend 2020. Our deploy was going to happen on Tuesday instead of Thursday because Thursday was a holiday (no one would be working) and Wednesday was a half day.
Tuesday afternoon at 1pm, she messages me and the dev in charge of deploy about more changes! My time is already occupied because our Product Manager went on vacation and dumped a large amount of user acceptance testing on me. I scream at my computer at that point because I realize I’m in the ninth circle of hell. I tell the other dev in a separate message that Web Ops has been making changes EVERY DAY since I picked up that ticket.
Other dev tells her that we have to check with the C-suite executive for engineering because we’re not allowed to make changes to tickets so close to the deploy. This is actually the policy. He also tries to give Web Ops the benefit of the doubt because we’re not deploying on our usual day. He had to do that to so she didn’t feel bad (and so she doesn’t complain about us not working towards the company’s goals).
Other dev had to do the code changes because I was otherwise occupied with user acceptance testing. If I were him, I’d be pissed that I was distracted from concentrating on the deploy so close to the holiday.
Director of Web Ops was actually capable of even more chaos. I ranted about it before. For that dramatization and if you want to go down the rabbit hole, see: https://devrant.com/rants/4811518/...4 -
Hot take:
Want to bloat the shit out of your product and want to lose the core USP?
Want to stop solving the problem you set out to address?
HIRE A PRODUCT MANAGER.
PMs are expert at shit show. We fuck up everything.
God I hate my profession.
When I start my company, the mandatory rule for every PM will be that if you want to add or enhance a feature, they will have to remove a feature. Whoever fails to do so will be punished by having to clean up the code base and work in sales for a quarter.6 -
Question: How to deal with an idiot product owner?
Doesn't understand the job description. Thinks he's the manager. Controlling. Loud. Annoying. -
How do I put "forced to cowtow to a product manager who doesn't know the product" into my resume?
As an addition, maybe add in "asked questions several times but was browbeat into conformity only to realize conformity was wrong" and "asked for support I never got, then thrown under the bus when I acted on my own on a deadline". If it helps matters, I have been in meetings I never should have been in and had to make decisions I never should have been in the position to make.2 -
In a sprint planning meeting, tickets are supposed to be detailed prior right? Right? So why are people asking basic "what are we supposed to be doing in this ticket?" questions in this meeting? I proposed doing these meetings and as soon as the concept got hijacked I knew this was going to happen, but damn it I had hope.
And I am so sick of my product manager not knowing the product. These meetings go so fucking cock-eyed because this woman can't be bothered to know the damn product. At all.3 -
Oh mannnnnn
We had a meeting with a data analyst today who is going to build an ML system for us.
...but at the start of the meeting, he didn't even know what our existing product even looks like!!!
...
Good one management!
Do I literally have to do EVERYTHING? It should be YOUR job to make sure every member has the essentials to participate in the meeting; YOU'RE the manager, NOT me!!!!
Oh also, let's not forget I got the meeting appointment HALF AN HOUR before it started...
#justmanagementthings
🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡 -
For me, at work, it's very important to have an inspiring figure with whom I can interact and in lucky cases, get to work with.
I recently changed companies and in my previous company, inspiring people were left, so left.
Now in my new company, I have met 5 6 people and not finding anyone inspiring enough, everyone is young, I am also only 27 but still I'm an old soul. My manager is young and he's chill person but I'm not at all inspired by him I don't think he tries to charm anyone anyway. All other developers too in the team are just meh. Product is good, so I'm looking for work but losing the motivation to do good and better each day as I don't have anyone I want to become like.
:(
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