Product orgs, reality, and vibes

Pavel Samsonov joked on Bluesky a while back that “B2B software is named either Andromeda or ThingDoer:”

Andromeda uses cutting edge AI, is endlessly configurable, has a huge sales team, and loses tons of money because at the end of the day it does fuck-all.

Thing Doer makes Excel files regulation-compliant, and earns 300 million dollars per year.

Today, Pavel extended the saga of Andromeda and ThingDoer with a funny, sadly resonant note about the people within those kinds of companies:

Similarly, the project manager running Andromeda is a glorified meeting facilitator, while the project manager in charge of Thing Doer has a degree of power that would impress most kings

I quote-skeeted this with some of my experience of different places I’d worked and the different levels of P*M power, and what seemed to separate places where PMs had influence vs. where they were just JIRA and calendar jockeys. Then, having left that thread dangling to deal with some dog stuff, I “pulled it all the way out of the spool and down the block. ”

What follows is a cleaned-up, lightly expanded version of my whole Bluesky-based thesis about product orgs, reality, and vibes.

When I was at Adobe, product and program managers wielded tons of power, at least on some teams. The closer a team was to actual revenue (or KPIs for Creative Cloud) the more power they had.

At Google and Webflow, PMs had astonishingly little power compared to engineers. Often, an engineer would YOLO a product decision — I mean stuff like “we should ship this brand new API I just wrote to users, like tomorrow” — and PMs had to scramble to make it look like a cross-functional plan.

At Stripe, it was sort of a mix of the two. PMs (especially “leads” and double especially “business leads”) on successful, revenue generating products were rulers of their domains, while PMs on novel products or infrastructure teams were just managing JIRA tickets.

At the risk of getting all LinkedIn here, this is what I’ve taken away from seeing all these different levels of PM power:

Reality vs. vibes

A PM’s power is proportional to how close they are to the money, or some proxy for the money. Decisions with dollar signs attached to the outcome tend to carry more weight.

PMs tend to have the least power in orgs with a fuzzy relationship with money, such as VC-backed startups. Again, by “money” this can also be retention, CSAT, or any other KPI that truly matters for the company’s health and future.

These are probably better called “reality-based” orgs.

In reality-based orgs, the PM game is all about orchestrating a roadmap that will make the best use of the team’s time for the greatest concrete benefit, which is easy to tell, because there are real numbers and stakes involved.

When a place isn’t based in reality, it’s based in vibes. The vibes usually come from inside the house, from a founder-CEO or other uber-powerful leaders. Sometimes they come from a company’s investors, or investors the company wish they had, or from whoever the founder or investors follow on Twitter.

Vibes can, of course, echo reality. Something real can happen which causes first a trickle, then a ripple, then a flood of reactions, and even though many in our industry will be reacting to the reactions, it all started from a real-world catalyst. The problem with vibes is that the catalyst doesn’t have to be real. It can be anything. If someone with enough social clout says they’re concerned AGI will eliminate half of all Little League baseball coaching jobs by Q4 — something that’s just absurd on its face — it’ll nonetheless ripple across tech Twitter until it feels irresponsible not to react to it.

In vibes-based orgs, the PM game is to attach oneself, barnacle-like, to whatever direction or decision is gonna happen regardless, and convincingly argue that you helped make it reality.

Shame and modesty have no place in this kind of product org. In fact, they tend to make you look weak.

Vibes-based and reality-based product cultures can coexist in the same company. Sometimes this is down to who manages the teams, sometimes it’s because a product portfolio is a mix of different bets and the presence of PM is seen as necessary for success whether it’s true or not.

When one company contains both, it’s usually because some business units contribute more than their fair share of revenue — at Google, the Ads and Search divisions always seemed more or less reality-based, while other areas (Pixel hardware, Photos, AR/VR) ran more on vibes in the absence of market data.

A reality-based PM leader can sometimes coach a vibes-based IC so they’re at least treading water; a vibes-based PM leader cannot effectively manage reality-based PM ICs, and in fact will often PIP them or just make their lives miserable until they quit. (Ask me how I know this.)

Companies that seek “founder mode” or anything like it are vibes-based. Reality-based companies don’t need “founder mode” because they have a handle on their place in the universe. They know who they serve, how, why, and where all the levers are. “Founder mode” and similar tech-Twitter mind viruses are a symptom of shockingly powerful people waking up anxious that they don’t know what their companies are doing or why, but also convinced that the answer will — and must — come from them. In other word: vibes.

When your various Brians (Chesky, Armstrong) go on conference stages or X saying they’ve eliminated the PM function, they obviously cut jobs, but didn’t change anything, because those PMs had no power to begin with.

A brief aside about program/project managers

I’m talking a lot about product managers, but this basic philosophy also holds true IMO for program managers (PgMs) or project managers (PrMs).

Because PgMs/etc are merely tracking and reporting, not deciding, their role is seen as critical to keeping ships afloat and trains on their tracks, even if these vehicles are flying at Ludicrous Speed to nowhere.

Good PgMs or PrMs in reality-based orgs are keepers of the Current Status, whether an effort is On Track, which is a vital tactical complement to the PM’s strategic view.

Conversely, in vibes-based orgs, PgMs will often find themselves absolutely beside themselves with rage from constantly-shifting priorities and total lack of clear explanations.

In one former job working on an enterprise design system, we had a new director of engineering join from another big enterprise company who was convinced that a) our only goal should be to ship more elements (they rammed through an OKR that committed us to develop and ship “20 components”), and b) the main barrier to that goal was poor execution. They required the whole 80+ person org across two sites to attend a weeklong Agile training, and also gathered the PgMs in a room to condescendingly explain how the “Agile flywheel” was expected to work. Two of our three PgMs quit within a month. The one team that had agreed to pilot Scrum hated it with a fiery passion, and by mid-year we’d all agreed to forget it ever happened. AFAIK, that engineering leader is still there.

Anyway, unlike PMs, who are blamed for other people’s chaos and buffoonery, managers like spreadsheets and PgMs have them. Vibes-based orgs that cycle through product managers like Kleenex during allergy season will sometimes end up with teams of hard-blooded, endlessly professional PgMs because people like that Agile-advocating engineering director thrive on process theater. After work, these folks will either have immediately run home to their kids, or they’ll be the first to the bar and will drink you under the table.

Attack of the $50 billion vibes orgs

The most toxic trend in our industry over the past 10-15 years has been that companies can get huge without ever making contact with reality.

Tech had previously gone through the dot-com bubble phase in the 1990s, when there was apparently an endless money faucet for any stupid idea that could be built as a website. But the large amounts of money and lack of rigor were nothing compared to the 2010s mobile/app boom, which in turn pales in comparison to what we’re seeing now with AI.

We often assume that “huge” must somehow mean “good” so vibes PMs end up managing teams in reality-based companies and making messes everywhere.

For example: being “data-driven” is not a sign that a PM or team are reality-based, though it’s often mistaken for one. Vibes can be expressed in metrics. In fact, the most entrenched vibes cultures often have elaborate rituals and systems for making vibes-based decisions look rigorous by making lots of people work on nonsense data. You can tell when a vibes-based Head of Product is in charge because there’s a lot of process but zero clarity.

What I call “vibes” is really a cute word for “power.” It describes cultures where (say) the founder-CEO’s whim (sorry, “vision”) can override reality, usually because reality is a lot less impressive than the vision. If you’ve raised $300M but have no revenue or users, vision’s all you got.

Likewise, if you have what reality would call a healthy business, but there’s no path to sustained exponential growth, founders will often start leading by vibes in search of a Hail Mary strategy that’ll turn (say) a niche vertical SaaS into a multi-product platform with perfect retention and MRR growth.

A sign that even the finance people are running on vibes is when a new line of business that hasn’t even been prototyped shows up on a slide, expected to contribute a double-digit share of revenue in some future year. When you peel back all the layers of wishful thinking and fake rigor, you’re left with basically a wish: we sure hope this works better than what we’re doing now. Pure vibes.

“Why is everyone doing what they think I said?”

I’ll close with an anecdote from when I worked at Stripe.

At one point, a mailing list post by CEO Patrick Collison made the rounds that was like: “I’ve heard more and more people explain decisions by saying it’s what I want. I don’t recall saying anything of the sort, but moreover, I don’t think that’s a good basis for decision-making.”

AFAIK, Patrick fancies himself an extremely reality-based person; his public persona is both Renaissance Man and wunderkind, responsible for both founding think tanks and academic prizes with economist Tyler Cowen, and for introducing thousands of extremely nerdy in-jokes to the Stripe Slack.

So it was very awkward for him to notice how parts of his company were — like so many other big corporations — totally vibes-based. For me, this was a reminder of how Patrick and his brother/co-founder John had never worked anywhere except companies they’d founded, and that Stripe (with, at that time, 7,500 employees) was the largest organization they’d ever been a part of.

If they’ve never had to work under someone else, I imagine it must possible for a person to become CEO of a global online payments concern and just not know how easy it is for their employees to sublimate their own judgment and just do what they think the boss wants. Reality is messy, made up of numerous noisy signals that can be viewed through myriad different lenses. “What Patrick wants” is simple by comparison. Who wouldn’t choose simplicity, especially when the boss is as liked and respected as Patrick?

Anyway, Patrick’s response was to post about it, then move on. Vibes-based strategic planning continued.