zlacker

Interesting. I had the opposite experience. All of the product suite having no idea about what the product even is, where it should go, making bad decisions over and over, excusing their bad choices behind "data" and finally, as usual, failing upwards eventually moving to bigger startups.

I have yet to find a product person that was not involved in the inception of the idea that is actually good (hell, even some founders fail spectacularly here).

Perhaps I'm simply unlucky.

>>Draike+(OP)
At a consulting firm I worked with a product guy who I thought was very good, and was on the project pretty much from the beginning (maybe the beginning, not sure. He predated me by well over a year at least). He was extremely knowledgeable on the business side and their needs and spent a lot of time communicating with them to get a good feel of where the product needed to go.

But he was also technical enough to have a pretty good feel for the complexity of tasks, and would sometimes jump in to help figure out some docker configuration issues or whatever problems we were having (mostly devops related) so the devs could focus on working on the application code. We were also a pretty small team, only a few developers, so that was beneficial.

He did such a good job that the business eventually reached out to him and hired him directly. He's now head of two of their product lines (one of them being the product I worked on).

But that's pretty much it. I can't think of any other product people I could say such positive things about.

>>cables+u1
It's rare, and that makes it a spectacular leg up when you have a person who is great at it.

>>Draike+(OP)
In my comment, the emphasis is definitely on the "product people who know what they are doing" and "good product people".

Of course, if the product suite is clueless, nobody is going to miss them, usually it's better the have no dedicated product people, than having clueless product people.