Ask HN: How to provide feedback to developers as a Product Manager

13 points by thala 2 years ago | 9 comments

As a non-technical product manager having direct developer reports, how do I help them grow in their career? We don't have engineering managers in our org and hence the product managers have to double up as engg. managers as well. And most of my team developers are very young and recent graduates and I want them to get the right mentorship to grow. I do have regular one-on-one chats with them in a casual setting and discuss about non-work things.

croo 2 years ago |

I agree with the other commenters that if all you have are juniors this will cause problems and - unless some of them are more than what meets the eye - you are doomed. I was however once in the shoe of your Devs and I may have a few pointers that you can do that helps them, regardless of how successful your product will be.

0. Get a senior programmer next to them to be a tech lead. (Yeah yeah I know..)

1. Describe the problems they need to solve as detailed as you can then trust them as much as you dare to bring a solution. Do not try to invent/describe the solution. This helps critical thinking and independence.

2. If anything is finished, be happy for it and communicate your happiness. This gives them direct contact to a person whose problems they can solve and is a great motivator.

3. Get them an udemy or similar account and try to set together a learning/development path that interests them and can be used in their daily tasks. This helps gaining knowledge.

4. Praise them when they hit their goals

kingkongjaffa 2 years ago |

> As a non-technical product manager having direct developer reports

It’s nice that you want to help them but this is a huge red flag for your company.

Product managers should not have engineers as direct reports.

You’re either sacrificing your product work to spend time doing an engineering managers job, or sacrificing supporting your direct reports to do product work. No one is winning in this situation, certainly not your company, and they are not setting you up for success.

Likely you’re really a project manager looking after a feature team of engineers, so no real product work is happening in this situation anyway.

If I were you I would:

a) stop developing new features right now.

b) escalate the issue with this really bad team topology to whoever can fix it.

Likely your CEO, if you have a CTO why don’t they care about supporting their engineers? If you have a CPO / head of product, why are they not supporting you?

c) only work on tech debt to keep your team busy and doing something useful for a few weeks while you figure out a way forward.

d) you need to find someone with some role power who can hire people to support your department/team and get team set up properly. Ideally that means you no longer have any direct reports who are engineers.

e) if they can’t figure this out you probably need to look for a different job because the experience you’re getting doing this isn’t really helping you grow as a PM. The very last thing I want my PM’s worrying about is directly managing engineers.

mattbrewsbytes 2 years ago |

You can't. It would be like an architect attempting to give feedback to a junior electrician. You have to be able to assess someone's work output (i.e. code in this case) to know where they are and what they might need to get more experience doing.

If you don't have an engineering background or any senior engineers around, you don't have expertise to share or to even know if what they are building is being done properly. Properly means many different things and there can be many different solutions to the same problem that are all fine.

I would suggest your organization hire an EM and/or a Senior Engineer/team lead that can help guide solutions. Or if you're in a department of a larger company, see if there are mentors available from other departments.

jf22 2 years ago | |

As an experienced engineering manager, 90% of the membership and coaching my reports asked for was non-technical. Work output was rarely discussed as senior engineers and peers handled code concerns during the PR process.

mattbrewsbytes 2 years ago | | |

They indicated it’s a team of all juniors so I didn’t see how they can receive any coaching on software. There’s a lot of growth from junior to mid and senior, it can happen fast but without guidance the basic work and software designs could be a large issue.

kypro 2 years ago |

From the paragraph you've shared here this sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

How is the quality of work of these developers being assessed? Is there anyone senior overseeing their work – and if so, would they not be more suitable?

And in terms of the team structure, I genuinely find it hard to believe that the majority of your team are recent grads... That's insane. Imagine if you went to the dentist and it was full of of junior dentists – would not be concerned about the quality of dental care you'd receive? Do you process CCs, do you handle sensitive data, do you provide business critical services? Because if you do you really need to be ensuring you're doing things correctly and not just hacking stuff together like it's a college project...

Honestly I struggle to ensure quality in teams where ~25% of the team are junior...

stocktech 2 years ago |

Good for you for trying to do right by your team, but oof. An entirely junior team with no tech leadership is going to have problems beyond mentorship.

lulznews 2 years ago |

Sounds pretty lulzy but just try to coach them on non tech things like comms etc and just yolo hope that the tech stuff works itself out.

Tabular-Iceberg 2 years ago |

What’s your tech stack? Find someone who’s highly respected in that stack’s community to pay to mentor your devs.

It’ll be expensive, but that’s simply the cost of having all juniors that you have to eat. That or eat the cost of bad quality software and constant failure to deliver.