The author lost me with his unabashed bias in speaking of other executives:
In the case of someone like Mayer or Steve Jobs—who was accused of many of the same flaws—those strengths and weaknesses make for far better results than the executive alternative, whether it’s a corporate hatchet woman like HP’s Carly Fiorina, an overpaid functionary like Citi’s Vikram Pandit, or an unrepentant economy wrecker like Lehman’s Dick Fuld, not to mention undistinguished wheel tillers like Apple’s John Sculley and his current reincarnation, Tim Cook. Whatever Mayer does with Yahoo, she at least has a fighting chance to revive the company, something that could never have been said of her predecessors.
He could easily make the same point without adding the unnecessary negative adjectives: "Overpaid", "Unrepentant", "Undistinguished". For the record, I think Tim Cook is a very distinguished wheel tiller (if by wheel tiller you mean operationals/supply chain expert) and Vikram Pandit earned $1 in total compensation in 2009-2010, only getting paid starting in 2011 when Citi had already been profitable for a year. Before anyone argues the merits of Tim or Vikram, let me emphasize that my point is not on their merits as CEOs but on the way they were described to make a point for Marissa Mayer.
I came to say the same thing about Cook. If you look at Jobs, Mayer, etc as "product managers" that focus on creating value vs the others named that slash expenses, you have to recognize Cook's brilliance in creating the world's greatest supply, operations, and logistics machines. It's the offensive line to the iPad and iPhone's star quarterback, and a superior product in it's own right.
That said, maybe Cook's dream of a well oiled machine is more limited than Jobs' vision. Or maybe it needs to be expanded to not just be about Apple.
Agree. Some good points in the article but he ends up losing credibility with sweeping statements and a distortion of facts. Tim cooks is a highly capable CEO but just has a different skill set. Peter Drucker said it well, people with great strengths also have great weaknesses. A sure path to mediocrity is to glorify all round generalists. Single purpose tools will win over them any day! (which I believe is the main point the article is trying to make, whether it be PM'ing, operations, people management or even sales!).
Jobs would not have been as succesful in phase 2 of his career without Tim Cook. Cook is an operations expert and a great people manager. He cleaned up Job's messes--being abusive and a royal jerk, taking credit for other people's ideas and being a terrible listener.
And where would jobs be without Woz's technical wizardy?
What is the problem in calling public people for what they really are? Vikram Pandit is overpaid [1], John Sculley was clearly unfit for the position, and although Tim Cook is talented as a supply chain expert, he is not the visionary that Steve Jobs was.
Also, while Tim Cook is not quite the visionary that Steve Jobs is, Apple's supply chain and ability to exert quality and pricing pressure over suppliers is a huge competitive advantage, and arguably one that keeps their profits so far above other hardware manufacturers.
There are plenty of companies with awesome vision that fail because they can't execute the way Apple can.
When Steve Jobs accepted the job as a interim-CEO to clean-up Sculley's mistakes, back when Apple was almost bankrupt, he accepted the $1 salary on the expectation that he would be paid only if Apple would perform well. That's how much faith and commitment he had in Apple succeeding, and that was before the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad...
Compare Steve Jobs attitude with Pandit's, who announced he would "reduce" his salary to $1 in 2009, only after the $25b in govt bail-out. On that same year, he was compensated "just a few million dollars" (as opposed to $38m in 2008), plus $165m for his hedge fund. [1]
First, including the $165M from the sale of a hedge fund in his CEO compensation is misleading. He received this for a completely different reason than his tenure as CEO.
Second, if you are going to include Pandit's full compensation, you need to include the millions of Apple shares that Steve Jobs received for his tenure as Chairman of the Board at Apple:
My statement "on the expectation that he would be paid only if Apple would perform well" meant "paid in bonuses", which includes the shares and perks. Also, I never stated that Jobs made less than Pandit -- You said first: We are not arguing about compensation here.
Point being: Jobs accepted a new position and would earn money only if he would deliver. Pandit in the other hand would make money regardless what was the outcome, staying on the position he was before. He screwed it up, got bail-out by the government, reduced his salary to $1 as a mea-culpa, then made a bunch of money and left. Is this what a good CEO would do?
To say that Pandit, who became CEO in December 2007, somehow screwed up Citibank, reflects a misunderstanding of the history of the crisis.
The CDO and MBS markets had been in place for a decade, and were already cratering when Pandit was brought on, and in fact he was brought in to replace the previous CEO following "unexpectedly poor Q3 performance."
Pandit took a reduced salary in 2009 following the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers in fall 2008, which eventually led to the creation of TARP funding. His compensation was only brought back after 2 years and 5 consecutive quarters of profitability.
>>and although Tim Cook is talented as a supply chain expert, he is not the visionary that Steve Jobs was.
There are very few people in the entire world who can be compared to Steve Jobs in this regard. In America, there is only one such person and he is busy running an electric car company and a space rocket company simultaneously.
So yeah, the fact that Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs v2.0 should not be surprising. He was never meant to be. What matters is that he is exceptional in other ways and Apple has benefited from his talents tremendously.
>>and Vikram Pandit earned $1 in total compensation in 2009-2010
I don't disagree with the rest of what you said, but this is bullshit. Most CEOs are compensated via stock options. So the fact that his salary was $1 doesn't mean anything.
The Whole Explanation: She's a woman and the CEO of a major website; which isn't to say that she doesn't deserve more attention given the smaller number of female CEOs/women in tech.
When Fiorina was the CEO of a significant corporation, HP, she got a lot of ink, too. Of course, HP itself, got a lot of ink before, during and immediately after her tenure there.
Miss. First of all, citing Google as an example in product management is a mistake. Google has, overall, pretty bad product management. Its strength is hard engineering. Being a PM at Google is like having Risk Management at LTCM or Amaranth (hedge funds that blew up) on your resume.
Second, in many tech companies, PMs outrank engineers and the commoditization of tech talent hasn't really gone away. It's just that the titular concept of the "executive" is out of style among the rising generation. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
A good engineer can PM his own work, and doesn't need someone else to tell him what color to paint the bike shed.
> A good engineer can PM his own work, and doesn't need someone else to tell him what color to paint the bike shed
A good product manager, having done their job, has provided the good engineer with enough information about goals, features, requirements, user profiles and so on that the good engineer can run with that information and build something kickass. In many cases, the good engineer has enough information that they can make informed decisions about things that were not covered by the PM, such as what color to paint the bike shed.
Sure, but the process can become wildly unbalanced. If the engineering is enough of a limiting factor that 90% of the planned ideas never happen and the 10% remainder consists entirely of mission-critical features, then a PM doesn't have much value proposition and it makes sense to combine the engineer and PM roles (supplemented with a culture of "why are you doing that" at standups to prevent tunnel-vision).
The opposite can happen too, of course, when the engineers focus on features that nobody actually wants. I think grandparent's point was that PMs aren't always a good cure for this problem.
> A good engineer can PM his own work, and doesn't need someone else to tell him what color to paint the bike shed.
This highlights exactly how badly she failed at Google. Many Google products are invidiually well-designed. Google makes lots of fantastic things. But the overall product line of Google has always been an incoherent mess, and is only now in the modern era of Plus and Android getting collectively organized.
And since a solid engineer can design a solid product, where does the Product Manager come in? The larger vision. The whole interconnectedness of their entire product line.
I'm on the fence about this. I've worked in an organization with product managers for nearly 8 years now. The good product managers know how to drive the product (and understand the market, something engineers may not be interested in) but allow engineers to do their thing. The not-so-good product managers get caught up in small details (like what color to paint the bike shed) and attempt to tell engineers how to implement features.
About 18 months we were acquired by a larger company which had product management in one business unit but not another. We were allowed to keep our PM structure. 18 months later, guess what units have the highest revenue? And guess what unit bled money?
In my experience, a good PM says "no" to things. I've worked on projects with a weak/ineffectual PM that suffer badly from "feature creep", because the engineers on the team continually moved to make "minor" changes to improve things that ultimately customers didn't want or need. To me, this is where a PM comes in to set the pace and keeps the engineers on track for specific goals.
Granted this is just my experience, and it's from an engineering POV.
And, a good PM also says "no" or "can it wait" or "ok, if you insist, but here's the downside" to folks on the other side of the line - customers, senior management.
Yes, this. Dealing with the upstream is the part of product management that most engineers severely dislike. Also, dealing cross-functionally with all the parts of a product team that aren't engineering (are marketing up to date on the launch? what's our ops plan?) -- and reaching out across teams to collaborate and build new products. I've worked with some great tech leads who were almost entirely PMs in terms of what they did, but that left them with very little time to actually write code.
A good engineer can do lots of things on their own, many of which are a poor use of their time.
Any engineer working on a sufficiently complex project will spend 100% of their time in meetings without a PM. Even if your average engineer is better at PMing than your average PM (a belief that requires some serious hubris), if the engineer is left with no time for building things then zero work gets done.
> If "stakeholders" are that demanding of peoples' time
Sure, for 1 or 2 stakeholders. What if there are dozens? Big projects have lots of requirements and lots of people to coordinate. This is not a small task that can just be hand-waved away.
> If your culture isn't engineer-driven..
Engineers are important and there are notable examples of companies being engineer driven, however you are dismissing the vast majority of companies with your statement. Considering a good chunk of startups are CRUD apps on top of a UI framework of some variety, I doubt many tech startups even need to be engineer driven these days.
I've spent a lot of time in technology product management (PM) and I still frequently encounter "Product Managers" who are doing entirely project management (PMO). And there's business analysts and other technical product management functions that are centered around requirements and specifications rather than market discovery, product fit and strategy, plan for making actual money, etc.
I'm not suggesting that anyone in the thread is conflating PM and PMO in this way, but it's a challenge for the profession and I wouldn't be surprised if given posters perspectives reflect different views on what the PM role is actually supposed to be the expert on. I don't think it's their fault. We use a hyper-generic name that is almost indistinguishable in full and acronym'd form. We also tend to write awful job postings, though that's a rant for another thread.
Well, the PM job is so fluid depending on the product, the team, and what's needed to get it shipped. I've worked with engineering teams that just needed project management from me, although I think PM-style project management may involve more ruthless decision making as it's usually a case of fitting a very large peg into a very small hole.
Except that PM is about hell of a lot more than PMing the work of an engineer. It is called "Product" management for a reason. Dealing with engineers is just 1 aspect of it.
"A good engineer can PM his own work, and doesn't need someone else to tell him what color to paint the bike shed."
You can supervise a technical team, do performance reviews, code reviews, mentor junior team members AND go out and talk to customers to build use cases and triage feature requests?
i fully agree with your last statement and please spread this mindset far and wide. it really should be engineers making all product designs/decisions. from UI and complex business workflow coverage to all the nice roadmap conversations with customers. and all those devs complaining about "distractions" from their coding? all BS, they like spending 90% of their time fiddling with the above.
Most tech companies have parallel career tracks for engineers and product managers with equal "ranks" on both tracks.
Good engineers can do some PM work. But in vertical markets where the engineers lack personal experience in that field it's unrealistic to expect them to make good decisions about what customers need. For example, good luck finding an engineer who really understands how physicians use EMRs. That's why you have to bring in specialist PMs.
In the case of someone like Mayer or Steve Jobs—who was accused of many of the same flaws—those strengths and weaknesses make for far better results than the executive alternative, whether it’s a corporate hatchet woman like HP’s Carly Fiorina, an overpaid functionary like Citi’s Vikram Pandit, or an unrepentant economy wrecker like Lehman’s Dick Fuld, not to mention undistinguished wheel tillers like Apple’s John Sculley and his current reincarnation, Tim Cook. Whatever Mayer does with Yahoo, she at least has a fighting chance to revive the company, something that could never have been said of her predecessors.
He could easily make the same point without adding the unnecessary negative adjectives: "Overpaid", "Unrepentant", "Undistinguished". For the record, I think Tim Cook is a very distinguished wheel tiller (if by wheel tiller you mean operationals/supply chain expert) and Vikram Pandit earned $1 in total compensation in 2009-2010, only getting paid starting in 2011 when Citi had already been profitable for a year. Before anyone argues the merits of Tim or Vikram, let me emphasize that my point is not on their merits as CEOs but on the way they were described to make a point for Marissa Mayer.