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11 anni fadiscuss

Finland is not 'Nokia headquarter', Cambridge is not 'research', and India is not 'outsourcing'. All have product building teams (with all the disciplines involved - Dev, PM, Design). Some places are small (lesser people) Ex. Cambridge, some places are large (India - with complete end to end ownership of product building). And there are Japan, China & Israel R&D divisions too and same applies to those places as well (all disciplines are involved in making of whatever products they are creating).

0987612345

11 anni fadiscuss

Another ex-softie, from UX background, senior level. I never understood why PMs are given the task of designing (user flow, interactions) features. They are never trained for that in their academics, at the time of hiring they are never quizzed on that (if they are then its on the whims of individual interviewer). And absolute worst is some of them are not even very passionate about it but they end up doing because their manager expects them to. Most of the time they come in the way of designers - that is the good part. The bad part is when they take ownership of UX design and the design team has to constantly struggle to get their inputs in. Universally at Microsoft PMs are seen as the ‘owner’ for the UX design, since they write the ‘specs’. The ‘Spec’ (specification document) is compilation of screenshots from design team in a word documents with a narration of the flow. In places like Office there are so many PMs that many a times there will be a spec documents for dialog boxes.

A notorious team in Office (where E. Chisa worked) is the OneNote, that team used to take pride till couple of years back that they don’t have any designers, all UX design is done by PMs. No wonder EverNote came out of no where and steamrolled them (I’m personally a big fan of OneNote for its feature set, but hate the User Experience).

To me Microsoft’s biggest bane is the PM discipline, they are holding back MS on taking up Apple, Google to new startups (whenever MS engg team was design driven - Ex. Windows Phone - it came out with great products). The PM discipline used to make sense 20 years back, but not now to the extent that one would have 10-12 PMs for a dev team of 40-50.

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