Great piece, but it makes me feel like I'm atypical in my field, and perhaps that as the product field has grown up it's become super boring. I have no doubt that some PM jobs are the way you stereotype web2, especially at big tech companies. But I would never want one of those roles.
I've been a PM by title for 15 years, longer by responsibility/scope. I've always been a 0-1, often pre-PMF, always shipping, always carrying water for ENG and UX, often writing prototype code and sometimes landing patches. PM'ing in these cases is always more art than science, there's never enough data, you have to make decisions, execute, and own it. I also currently work at Mozilla where our code, our bugs, and our community chatter is all in the open.
Product has matured a lot since I got into it. I'm grateful there are career tracks and resources for folks to grow and move companies. I have noticed that the PM role has ossified at many companies, and seen it at events. If the majority of the PM jobs are the way you describe the web2 space -- watching a graph go up and down, abstracted away from engineering and technical exploration, removed from the shipping process, writing TPS reports -- that makes me sad for the field. There will always be a need for 0-1 PMs (whatever the job title actually is) because small teams especially hit velocity (velocity = speed + direction) ceilings. It doesn't matter how fast you are if you're headed in the wrong direction.
Strategy gets a bad name because so many big companies do it so badly. Strategy is choices + execution. If a company decides to prioritize devrel (as rexstjohn suggested) that's strategy.
I've been a PM by title for 15 years, longer by responsibility/scope. I've always been a 0-1, often pre-PMF, always shipping, always carrying water for ENG and UX, often writing prototype code and sometimes landing patches. PM'ing in these cases is always more art than science, there's never enough data, you have to make decisions, execute, and own it. I also currently work at Mozilla where our code, our bugs, and our community chatter is all in the open.
Product has matured a lot since I got into it. I'm grateful there are career tracks and resources for folks to grow and move companies. I have noticed that the PM role has ossified at many companies, and seen it at events. If the majority of the PM jobs are the way you describe the web2 space -- watching a graph go up and down, abstracted away from engineering and technical exploration, removed from the shipping process, writing TPS reports -- that makes me sad for the field. There will always be a need for 0-1 PMs (whatever the job title actually is) because small teams especially hit velocity (velocity = speed + direction) ceilings. It doesn't matter how fast you are if you're headed in the wrong direction.
Strategy gets a bad name because so many big companies do it so badly. Strategy is choices + execution. If a company decides to prioritize devrel (as rexstjohn suggested) that's strategy.