Some PMs in the sector are beginning to question their own work - can we learn lessons from this?

Today I am going to explore the concept of the Bullshit job made popular by David Graeber – see how it applies to Product Management and explain why I think it’s time to bring a bit of humility within all the hype.

Content Overview:

What makes a BS Job?
Why PM is (sometimes) a BS job
Why Product Management is the new Investment Banking
The overuse of Product Frameworks

Bullshit jobs

You might have already heard about the concept of bullshit jobs made popular by David Graeber. The notion was explained in the article “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” from Strike! Magazine in 2013.

David Graeber later wrote a book about it in 2017. I found the book stodgy and difficult to finish because it was primarily over-stretching principles from the article, although I did enjoy several crucial learnings.

If you haven’t read it, the book provides details about:

The five types of bullshit jobs
Why bullshit jobs make people miserable
How we only recently came to accept that an employer “owns” us for certain hours a day
How religion and morale have led us to associate work with virtue
The myth of market inefficiency leading to the proliferation of bullshit jobs
How universal basic income would restore the balance between employees and employers and let them choose work that is fulfilling and valuable.

What I like best about this argument is that it is not Graeber who selects which occupations are BS. He put the ultimate test on the person by asking if they believe their job is significant and contributes to the world. If the response is no, the job is BS. However, it is evident from the book that Graeber believes that the majority of BS positions are in the service industry. This is why, according to David Graeber, if you work on your laptop in an office from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., you are most likely working in a BS job.

Why Product Management is a BS job

The fifth sort of BS job is the pointless taskmaster - a supervisor whose employees do not require any supervision at all. And talking with the Product Manager community, it would seem like that is what the Product role sometimes feels like. You are in charge of a team that would most likely function perfectly well without you.

As one Reddit user (which will be my main source of investigation for this article) pointed out:

“I would be nothing without my dev teammates, but my devs would probably get on pretty well without me. That gives me a real sense of humility I see lacking in so much PM discourse online.” (source)

Another test offered in the book to determine whether a job is BS or not is to envision a scenario in which an entire group of professionals vanishes from one day to the next. It claims that if nurses and garbage collectors disappeared tomorrow, the world would be a chaotic place. Could we apply a similar logic to the Product Manager? Is it possible to imagine a society without this role? Because the PM role is very new and I still can't describe it to my mother, I believe the answer would be "Yes - a world without Product Managers could work." And, to apply the world analogy to a technology firm, when do you believe a software company would be in a catastrophic situation? When all Product Managers have left, or when all Developers and Engineers have vanished?

“Stuff would 100% get done without me, and fundamentally my job day to day is a shit umbrella to protect the engineers and designers from nonsense, and to guide the narrative. I'm not indispensable.” (source)

Those are speculative scenarios, but they are quite sobering. In a world where Product Manager is becoming so trendy, PM wages are becoming increasingly competitive, and PMs are behaving like rock stars - it's refreshing to hear pragmatic views that counteract all the hype.

Finally, the best way to determine whether Product Management is a BS job is to interview the employees themselves, and we can see that a handful of them struggle to find their job important or contribute to something.

Is Product Management the new Investment Banking?

The Industry does require some humility. I began my career in investment banking, and it quickly became evident that my personality did not fit the work culture. From interns bragging about their American Express Black to analysts comparing their Rolex (all true stories), I spent the majority of my brief time in banking wondering, "what the hell am I doing here?" But it wasn't just bragging; it was also cruelty: I recall investment bankers making fun of one of our colleagues who ended up in the hospital due to overwork, with people calling him a "pu$y" who couldn't handle stress. Unfortunately, more and more I am seeing those profiles in Product Management.

“Back in the day, all of the product managers at my companies wanted to leave to go get their MBA. Today, everyone wants to go to business school to leave and become a product manager.” (source)

I once applied for a French FinTech unicorn PM role. I asked a few questions at the end of our conversation to demonstrate my interest. I was curious as to what aspect of the role they find most difficult. "The way we do Product is so unique and outstanding, I would struggle to work anywhere else, and I could not envision going back to working on Product the way I was doing before" the hiring manager deadpan replied. The most difficult aspect of the interview was not rolling my eyes. I then told this story to another PM, who admitted she had the same experience with this company, stating "oh god, they were so full of themselves."

I've also had PM interviews for international unicorns with "bad cop" and "good cop" settings that reminded me of my banking interviews - having a super busy and important Product Manager clearly showing they wanted to be anywhere else and had much more important things to do than discuss my unimpressive CV. The issue is that we're seeing an increasing number of those PM/rockstar profiles wear their FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) job titles as a badge of honor and are very quick to snub other PMs.

Giving up on savior frameworks

Aside from arrogance, certain Product Managers feel the need to lecture. Many Product Frameworks are developed, and many Product “gurus" will tell you how "you are doing Product wrong." They would either promote the most well-known Product ideas (be user-centric, fall in love with your problem) or, better yet, they would design THE new Product Framework that would solve all of your Product Management's terrible practices.

What we often overlook is that those PM leaders not only believe in this new system and have used it successfully in previous positions, but they also begin earning from it. Their main source of revenue is now selling a book or speaking at a Product Conference about their new framework. As a result, those PM gurus want to force their new paradigm down our throats, despite the reality that PM is not a science that can be followed by the book.

I did a training with 2 PMs from HP and the Product Culture they were describing was far from a utopia.

Is it all BS?

I enjoy my job as a Product Manager. It's not as glamorous as social media would have you believe; there's a lot of frustration every day, a lot of dealing with stakeholders you'd rather not have to deal with, but in the end, you work with extremely smart people (devs, UX/UI designers, founders), and you try to come up with a more user-centered approach that, ideally, would bring a better product to the market. Product Manager is also intellectually challenging as you have to tackle very diverse topics (from pricing to GTM, to Roadmap) and there is a collaborative part that makes the job human. For those reasons, I found Product Management rewarding and I believe it adds value to most companies.

However, it's useful to take a step back and consider the relevance of the PM function in our society, understand it wouldn't pass the David Graeber test, and start being humble. I left IBD due to the people and atmosphere, and I don't want to see the same bro's cocky culture migrate to this industry. Although PM roles are“en vogue”, there are many other roles that contribute to company goals and are done by individuals as smart with different skill sets.

“We are not geniuses”.

Also published here.