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Product Managers, listen to your Developers
The title could not be more poignant. If it could be more than just an internal scream of the digital equivalent of an underpaid mechanic, then it should be a mantra, uttered endlessly by product managers who think they know everything better than the specialists they govern.
Product individuals with little time: TLDR at the bottom.
It has been a while since my last post, but for my return to the written word I must address a serious issue in the tech landscape. During my years of absence I have taken on positions, increasingly more senior, up to my current position, which is CTO of a newly launched fintech platform, JustFlows. Through this process, luckily still very deeply involved in day to day software development, I have gone from “just” a software developer to someone who leads teams and has to deal with business on a direct communication level.
So what is this issue I speak of? It is that of ignorance in product. Product in the form of product managers and product owners, who, over the years, seem to have become more and more like salespeople, rather than an individual guarding and, more importantly, defining the product their team should be building. On top of that, a good product manager shields their team from outward influences that might disrupt their work unnecessarily.
