Whither Program Management
I read this thread about Cursor, which has scaled to $29B in revenue without any full-time PMs. I am guessing “PMs” are program managers based on context. I have a great affinity for the program manager job — and I am glad to see program management reset, getting back to basics.
In 1988, my first job title at Microsoft was Program Manager, Network Business Unit. I was new to the tech industry, new to the role, new to networking products. I was given a one-paragraph description of the job, and had a one-hour 1:1 with my manager, and I was off. I didn’t know what the f#$k I was doing.
I stumbled around for weeks or months trying to figure out the job. There were other program and product managers around me, all beavering away on their products, and I spoke with them and tried to immerse myself in the team. I installed all our products, our competitors' products, and read everything I could get my hands on. I talked to other new PMs across the company, spoke with developers, and spoke with executives, trying to figure out what this job was.
One day, I was talking with Bruce Jacobsen, a Microsoft “veteran” who had been at the company for a whole 2 years. And I was probably blabbering about my job, and he looked at me and said, “You can’t gain market share if you are not shipping.”
And everything snapped into place for me. My singular and unique focus on the team was to ship the product. And that meant finding and moving every rock that was in the way of shipping the product. Did the team need a spec for a feature? Then find one or write one. Did the team need to resolve a giant bug backlog? Then repro and triage bugs. Did the team need more developer or test help? Then fight for the resources, or jump in and write/perform some tests myself. Did the team need more customer input to help decide on feature direction? Then get the input. Every morning at my job, I listed out the top 10 things holding the team back, and that is what I worked on. Nothing else mattered. Other people on the team wanted to ship as well, but they had primary roles as a developer or a tester. My only responsibility was to ship.
Once I understood the priority of shipping, other aspects of the job became clear.
- We couldn’t ship a bad product. “Shipping” included ensuring the product had features that would attract customers and that product quality was good, so that we wouldn’t be constantly faulting or destroying customer data. But we had to be really focused on the minimum viable feature and quality bar, because shipping was paramount.
- There was no room for ego — all that mattered was shipping the product. If I worked on a team with a great development manager or architect who could write high-quality specs, I was happy to leave that to them and focus on other tasks. If my product manager partner wanted to jump in and help with building the product, great. If I needed to jump in and act as test manager for a while, that was fine. If people needed lunch or dinner brought in, I brought in lunch or dinner. There was always an infinite amount of work to be done to ship a product; it didn’t matter who did it.
- If the team wasn’t focused and engaged and productive, we were sunk. So I had to make sure they believed in the goal — including listening to them and adjusting the goal as necessary, and getting the team the data and anecdotes they needed to commit fully. I spent a lot of time making sure the key people on the team were listened to and were bought in.
Laser focus on shipping, leaving ego at the door, and team skills — those are what i learned and developed in the role, and those skills served me well throughout my career as I moved into other leadership roles.
Over time, I observed the program manager role become highly regimented in larger organizations. People started to think their sole job was to write specs, or define scenarios, or build plans, etc. This happened at Microsoft and across the industry. In one of my last roles, some junior PM was stunned that I had no formal PM certification, as I guess that had become a thing. The relationships between program management, project management, and product management became formalized and rigid. The focus on shipping was lost. This evolution made me sad — companies have lost a lot of shipping focus, and individuals’ jobs have become a lot less rich.
So I am thrilled to read about Cursor and how they are rethinking how they drive projects. I love their process — focused on shipping, focusing on building. I see some criticisms in the thread and I am sure sometimes the process misfires and they ship some ill-considered features, but it is a place I would love to work at. Similarly, I read about lovable and the “demo, don’t memo” ethos and I get excited about that.
I doubt I could get hired as a PM in a big tech company today, which is good, because it is not a job I would want. The more rigid and structured those PM jobs are, the more they are susceptible to replacement by AI, which seems to be happening. Figuring out how to wade through all the barriers and ship a relevant and appealing product — that seems like a timeless human skill.
Shorts
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