I have had two managers that stood out among many others due to one main quality (they had many other qualities): they were umbrellas, not funnels. They basically tended to the team like a gardener, handling each plant differently in a way that makes it most productive, shielded them from external pressures (though not to the point of mollycoddling), exposed the good work done via publicity and once all that was necessary was done, stepped back to let the plants be fruitful instead of blocking the growth by micromanaging.
It is a very rare quality and few can pull it off - if you find a boss like that, consider yourself lucky.
My best managers have been umbrellas, but with transparency. If something was happening in the company we would be informed, but could rest assured that our manager would do their best to work the issue for us while keeping us informed.
The worst managers I’ve had were umbrellas, but to such an extreme that they kept us in an isolated island separate from the rest of the company. We didn’t know what was going on in the company and had no chance to integrate that content into our work. It felt good at first, but over time I realized that the umbrella manager was trying to keep us in the dark so they could keep exclusive control over our work and neutralize any possibility of us competing with them among management. The last manager I had like this went so far they they would praise us for our work and give nothing but positive feedback, right up until he cut people for low performance. It felt like everything he did was for equal parts performance (looking like the ideal, happy, positive manager) and control (keeping us isolated from the rest of the company so he was always in full control).
Ironically, that manager now posts frequent leadership thoughts on LinkedIn and has a newsletter.
I think it's a really hard balance to strike. There's so much company politics/etc that isn't beneficial for a team to experience, but equally, without being exposed to that noise you won't develop an intuition that helps you navigate the organisation.
Whatever the situation I think it's crucial you can trust your manager to be straight with you and give their unvarnished opinion of things if you ask them directly. That helps you trust they're communicating things accurately to you, which makes you feel more comfortable relying on them to provide you with the information instead of trying to seek it out some other way.
My current boss is this way and it’s almost certainly to prevent competition/control the narrative to upper management and other teams/save his own ass. As a result, I usually don’t know who I’m building software for or how they’re going to use the software. He’s a real detriment to the company and I hope he gets the ax.
About 15 years ago I found myself in charge of building/growing/running a team in response to a product that was growing insanely. That growth went on for a decade.
I did the gardener thing, handling "each plant" differently, shielded them from external pressures, adjusted the level of management individually and let those that demonstrated the capability to make sane design decisions solve large problem areas on their own, etc.
I did not expose good work via publicity. I did express it to them personally and via salary increases etc. It was kind of made clear via osmosis in the team, but not outside of it. There was never that kind of culture in that company. It was also in egalitarian northern Europe.
Your comment made me think about whether I should have attempted to introduce it or not. I think I really should have. Sudden big regret.
You did the best that you knew how to at the time, and what you've described sounds like a great experience for your team; don't give yourself a hard time if you think you'd now do something differently. Getting better at something, or changing the way we want to do it, doesn't mean our past efforts were failures.
I mentioned publicity as a dimension of what made them excellent but it's not the only thing. Direct appreciation combined with salary increments are an excellent reward. You have nothing to regret and should be proud of your efforts.
> I’ve parachuted into companies as interim CPO, my first order of business has been to [...] A deeply opinionated subject expert with visible disdain for average users will focus on rarely used expert features and tend to ignore opinions from the bottom 95% of customers. [...] worth a frank talk about fit and attitudes.
So he "parachutes" into a company from nowhere and is executing his "first order of business". And, at that point, rather than approaching it with humility and having discussions where one man's opinion (his own) stacks up against another man's opinion (evil "subject expert"), he already thinks of himself as the keeper of the oracle -- the oracle being that elusive "95% of users" for whom he apparently speaks, and everyone with views opposing his own as troublemakers who need to be alienated at best and shoved aside at worst. ...sounds more like a run-of-the-mill manager, than a particularly enlightened one.
I get parachuted into companies as an interim “technology problem solver” with a variety of different titles, whatever suits the business and task at hand. Spoiler alert: technology is rarely the problem.
I always set the expectation that the first three months or so will be passive - lots of clients want results right now, since by the time they call me things have escalated, projects are out of time, budget, and some execs somewhere are out of patience - those first three months or so I spend time listening to everyone, understanding how they got to that point, understanding how the business works, understanding the project(s) and the reason for it, etc. Once we have that map we can work towards finding a way forward. This is usually something that has to come from the team and cannot be dictated by an “outsider”, and my role here is mostly to guide and mentor. We then identify any impediments and work to remove those. All of this is about process and approach, we are not really talking about technology.
“A deeply opinionated SME” is still an SME, asshole or not, and their role can possibly be re-framed to accommodate their strengths and weaknesses.
Of course, some (many) organisations are directly or indirectly institutionally toxic, and they demand immediate technology rip and replace approaches and firings to go along with that (“who was to blame for this mess?!?” Is often the ask in these places) - I don’t engage with those organisations as a rule.
The best thing about 95% of the users is that potentially no one is actually in that group.
Because product features don't exist in isolation. 95% of your users can share a pool of common features, but then every single one of them can have some divergent, extra feature as an utterly vital component of their workflow - without which the product does not fit.
Leading to the paradox: you eliminate features which aren't used by 95% of the user-base when looked at in isolation...and at the end of the day, your product isn't still suitable for 95% of the users, it's potentially usable for 0% of them.
Does anyone know what the appropriate type of statistical analysis would be if I wanted to try to discover groups of commonly used features?
Say I have a spreadsheet where the rows are users and the columns are "has used feature X in the past 30 days". How do I go from that to "there are three clusters of users who tend to use these distinct subsets of features"?
Clusters make a nice story, but you're going about it backwards. What are you trying to predict?
The scientific method suggests we create a hypothesis first, then design an experiment (or identify a natural experiment), then collect data, and finally perform a hypothesis test. Deviations from that process increase your risk of spurious results.
I think that's an especially uncharitable read of that, and taken out of context. He's saying you should assess the folks in your team and possible opportunities for them in their career path, because Product isn't a clear cut ladder like many other careers are. He didn't say this person was a troublemaker, he said that if they're really focused on the outside edge cases of expert users that they may be better suited focusing all of their time and energy on expert users in a role that allows for that, vs being expected to represent users that they don't care about. It's mostly about aligning people's passions and interests with the company.
You put a very negative spin on something that seems to be written with an intent towards positivity.
...well, my "System 1" [1] judgment of this person is that he's a bit full of himself, so I thought I'd quickly jot down some impressions.
Looking at it from this angle offers up a lot of interesting bullshit filter transforms of what he writes. Maybe it's taking too many liberties as an attempt to know this person's actual personality and/or the management philosophy he's trying to impart through this writing. But some of these thoughts are interesting in their own right and hagiography is boring. So, here are two more thoughts in a similar vein:
The "umbrellas, not funnels" idea: I agree that, at the higher levels of management, there's a lot of politics and other crap where it would be nice if employees could be shielded from it. But how do you actually make assessments in individual cases? For example, when some order comes down from above and is countermanded the next day due to corporate politics, how do you decide which order is irrelevant noise that your subordinates need to be "shielded from", and which order to pass along? You can only make that determination if you assume you know the higher-up bosses' jobs better than they do. You're also withholding vital information from your subordinates that would empower them to become political entities in their own right.
Or the "merchandize good work" idea: Let's use the word "credit grabbing" as a less flattering near synonym. Doing a lot of credit grabbing on behalf of your subordinates only sounds like a good idea in the head of a manager who assumes they can competently play the role of "assigner of credit" because they don't themselves suffer from the same blind spot problem. Say you're a middle manager and you delegate a task to an IC you manage. Unbeknownst to you, this is a task that requires coordination with another department, so your IC reaches out to an IC in that other department, and that latter person ends up having to do most of the work. You have a blind spot there: You can't see the work done by this other person who you don't manage, in a department you're not in, in relation to a task you may not know the particular mechanics of. Maybe your report even neglected to tell you about the contribution of this other person willfully, playing some politics of their own, and making you the instrument of their politics. Now you run around upper management doing credit grabbing on behalf of your report, and alienating the person who actually did most of the work. Maybe it would be better to institute a culture of no credit grabbing and no assigning blame? ...and maybe such a culture would have positive outcomes, even without making the assumption that managers are infallible (or need to be infallible to do their jobs)? ...just a thought.
When I try to picture the specific behaviours of someone who acts on that advice, I can't help but see the pattern of behaviour of someone who engages in power struggle selfishly. And all the reasoning he offers up, surrounding that behaviour, just sounds like a rationalization of that behaviour as noble and power-to-the-people-esque. ...a "righteous crusader" narrative to provide the ends that justify the means.
I've long felt that working under people who practice this management style make people feel like they can hang their hats, stop focusing on the rat race, and really strive for bringing creative solutions to their teams.
It may sound silly, but I think of it like being a hobbit that really wants to stay at Bombadil's place. Eventually, you know you'll need to leave... but the respite from merciless backstabbing that happens elsewhere feels humanizing.
My question is whether he would actually be that way in a company. As there are substantial incentives against this.
I am not a manager, but at an IC level, why would I prevent my manager from doing something stupid that wrecks the project? Better to just go along with it and make sure I have someone to blame as it is a lot easier.
My last company was started by two non technical brothers who got funding and hired a consulting company to build an MVP, find product market fit and got a few customers (B2B).
After that, they hired a CTO to bring talent in house. The CTO wanted to be cloud native and microservice based to sell access to the services to large health care providers for their own websites and mobile apps.
I was one of his first hires. I barely knew how to spell cloud then. But as we talked during the interview, he liked my ideas and hired me and said I seem like a smart guy and could figure it out.
We were once talking and he was going out of his way to be nice and give me feedback. He was in his late 40s. I finally just stopped him and told him that I’m a big boy, we have a lot to do and I don’t need a “shit sandwhich”. If I’m doing something wrong or have a stupid idea, just give it to me straight.
After about six months, we trusted each other to be honest. I could tell him “you know in your heart of hearts that won’t work and that’s a dumb idea”. He would tell me, “why are you coming to me with this.” He said I had admin access to our AWS account, the phone number to all of our vendors, etc and to come up with a design, a POC a budget and let him know.
I was an IC.
We got a lot of things done and buy the time Covid hit in April 2020, our site traffic increased by 400% and our scaling didn’t miss a step.
The company exited at 10x revenue 8 months after I left based partially on the impression their “agility” and scalability based on my designs working with my CTO.
It’s amazing what happens when you have a manager who can check his ego at the door and listen to their reports.
But that was at a 60 person company. I don’t say shit at BigTech. Like Kosh said “once the avalanche has started, the pebbles don’t have a vote.”
The incentives against speaking up to people up the chain are very strong, and sometimes management does illogical things for logical reasons.
I worked on a POC of a vendor product that, frankly, sucked. No one wanted to buy the thing but few would speak up to say so. No one could understand where we would use it or why. UI was 20 years out of date, it used an esoteric OOP scripting language instead of SQL, it was slower than our existing system, and no one had ever heard of the thing before. Basically it repeated all the existing complaints about our current stack, worse.
CTO was IN LOVE and it was clearly not a POC but a matter of finding an excuse to buy it & tech lead to own it.
My teammate and I were two of the few tech guys DGAF enough to clearly communicated it was a bad product, to which the response was that it was getting bought and they really wanted us to run the project, lol. No thanks. We both left within a year.
So why? After I left I found out.
The CTO was rather on the outs with our major business side stakeholder, and that guy had told him his buddy had this product we should really check out. So CTO saw it as - let me score some quick points by doing what the stakeholder says, and just minimize the blast radius of wherever we integrate it.
Usually making your manager look good to their manager is a way of increasing the influence and reach of your team. Being part of a team with influence and reach typically gets you more reward and better work.
I think this depends a lot on how sensitive to incentives one is.
Obviously, there are plenty of people who are. But there are also plenty who aren't.
I think at root we have twin problems. The very common ideology that personal financial incentives are the beginning and end of things. And the way people who hold that ideology (and those values) occupy so many positions of power.
But these are not universals throughout space and time. Paradigms change. And they change in part when we decide we want something else in the world.
I agree with all of this, but it's really depressing to me that even somebody like Mironov just takes this as a given: "Companies, especially executive teams, can generate a lot of chaos: 'small' interrupts, sudden shifts, cross-functional blame, budget jousting".
Like, I get that the toddler executive is the predominant worker experience under managerialist capitalism. And I get that is the consequence of entrenched ideologies and power structures. But I would like for more people to start leavening their "here is how you survive in a terrible system" advice with at least an occasional suggestion that this how things are in this historical moment. And ideally some ideas on how to start tilting things toward some saner future.
My experience is that some execs, some of the time, can reduce the chaos and give teams the running room/decision authority needed to do great work. (I've both failed and succeeded at it.) Part of this post was to encourage my peers to step up. Depending on ICs to push cultural change up through the org isn't IMHO a reasonable strategy.
Thanks for the reply. Yes, I agree that some execs can occasionally do better. I have even sometimes been that executive. I also agree with this as stated:
> Depending on ICs to push cultural change up through the org isn't IMHO a reasonable strategy.
But I think the world is bigger than that. My point is there are more possibilities than "hope for an exec who works in contradiction to the dominant paradigm" and "expect lone ICs to change things". Just as an example, those weren't big factors in getting us the 40-hour work week.
I think the term of art you're looking for is actually "command and control structure". This exact phenomenon appeared under communist regimes as well and is not unique to capitalism.
If you're interested in a real world example of an alternative structure read up on the corporation Mondragon - it's better but even large coops are not completely immune to this problem. Modern businesses appear to have an inherent need to focus large groups of people towards a singular vision and it's quite difficult to avoid the "toddler manager" effect.
I get HNers often thrive on being the smart guy, so I get the urge to correct. But that only is tolerable when you're actually right. Try occasionally assuming that the person you're talking to know what you are about to mention and still said what they said on purpose.
In particular, you don't seem to have any understanding of what managerialism is or why I am talking about it specifically here. And there's nothing you mention here that I haven't been familiar with for at least a decade. So no, I am not looking for that term.
I think the challenge organizations face is that good umbrella types end up not getting recognized because their smoothly run team is mistaken for an easy to run team - roughly analogous to the engineer who ships well built features vs one who ships sloppily built features then heroically fixes sevs.
Feels a bit like the Amazon leadership principle "be right, a lot".
If you have a manager who has been at the company a while and moved through several teams and all those teams felt like this: it's far more likely to be a result of their deliberate efforts than a coincidence.
I think the term "Shit" works better than "Poop" particularly for the especially bad managers.
I can't wait for my next 1:1 with my boss: "Hi, thanks for being a poop umbrella instead of a poop funnel." Or the next time I get a shitty boss: "Hi, have your heard about the MBA vernacular 'Poop funnels' vs 'Poop umbrellas'?"
I was literally just thinking about Rich Mironov and how I hadn't read anything by him recently (I admit I hadn't had my eyes out for it). Great to see new and relevant-as-ever content, his tips helped me a lot on the journey of switching from engineering to product management.
Not self promoting at all, I love your posts! I'll go check it out, I've been a big fan for years. Your post on what companies need in a VP of PM was very impactful on my career.
In a large org, this guy would work with people so high up the food chain that the average IC will never see or talk to. As one of the latter, I've seen a lot of meaningless initiatives spawned by executive-level advice or "coaching" like this. Here's an "Employees are our top priority" poster or "Pick a $20 gift certificate to your favorite national chain store from the company we hired to run the program."
Despair.com nailed it: "If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon."[0]
It is a very rare quality and few can pull it off - if you find a boss like that, consider yourself lucky.