Product and UX teams within @Labs are mediocre at best.
We have line-level PMs to Senior Directors who don’t know how to run a meeting let alone run sprint planning. They are so mediocre, full of apathy (aren’t they supposed to be the face of their product and team?), typical 9-5 and as Mr. Trump would say “weak people” that even being called a passive-aggressive (which is very common in the Bay Area) would be considered a compliment. If you ask a PM what was their single biggest achievement last week? The answer will be: oh I told Business to <woof>-off. It’s not: oh I ran some #s, did a deep-dive on a feature with my team, bounced-off ideas for a hackathon, worked on a new strategy to get more sign-ups etc.
And speaking of designers: they can’t move fast because they follow a traditional, waterfall approach. When UX churns out <woofy> design, their lame excuse time and again is “oh Walmart.com demographic is very different" - no it’s not. Not anymore. They are not <woofs> – unlike people from North Korea, US shoppers have access to the internet and are free to browse every g-d shopping website. By the way, what's more interesting is: every design (incl. something as small as font-color change) needs to be “approved” by an archaic committee of senior leaders – who all assemble for a few minutes, share their random $.02 and go back to browsing news websites and having long lunches. If you ask these so called “senior leaders” to design something in Sketch, I bet you $100 that they will fail miserably. Apple, FB etc. all have design review meetings – but they discuss and give feedback to the right problems that deserve honest attention - not every little change.
I only know of 1-2 PMs who know what the F is going on (you’d be confused if they are Design Leads or Engineering Managers as they know their s--t in and out) and get well respected by their teams. If you’re in HR or leadership – hear me out: your top PMs are on the run – the only reason they are still @Labs is because of H1B visa. Motivate and promote ‘em before they leave you scrambling.
