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Comment by barrkel

1 year ago

Product managers, technical program managers. You know. Glue people.

I didn’t take those roles as glue people. I took it as people who were technically adept but facilitators.

  • I don't think they're quite glue people in the way that Schmidt seems to have meant, but they're definitely people on the edge of teams that interface between different groups of people - PMs interface with sales, support, customers and development, while TPgMs interface with different technical teams to coordinate a bigger effort. They definitely glue different teams together into a common effort.

    I'm not wholly sure what Schmidt meant. Maybe vague hangers-on people who kind of dip in and out of things and cheerlead, and take a bit of credit for every project they have a finger in, but not doing any significant lift? I'm not sure at all though. I'm just trying to rationalize it.

In a way it’s not surprising that a company that has such a wonky product strategy as Google, hates product people.