Defining 'product guy' is hard because doing the role well requires multiple disciplines, and no one product guy is good at every discipline that's useful for the role.
Many entrepreneurial developers have a lot of contempt for product guys - in part because there's a lot of incompetent people out there in product management roles, in part because many of them have enough product skills to make a decent go of it on their own.
Personally, I'm a big believer in specialization and minimizing context-switching - with effective communication, a team where one individual largely focuses on product and the others largely focus on development seems more effective than a team where product responsibilities are divided evenly between the developers. (I suspect that's a minority opinion around here, though.)
I think this is only true with larger teams. On tasks that are't too large, 2 or 3 great "product smart" developers will beat a team of 6 or 7 with divided responsibilities.
It is also a function of how novel the product is. The ability of a team to think and work at multiple levels is invaluable when evolving along a new idea into a usable product. A product leader, would drive his developer team crazy if he changed his mind as often as is typically needed for a novel product.
Since start-ups begin with small teams and typically work on novel products, it makes sense that the HN crowd would be partial to the product smart generalist team approach.
Many entrepreneurial developers have a lot of contempt for product guys - in part because there's a lot of incompetent people out there in product management roles, in part because many of them have enough product skills to make a decent go of it on their own.
Personally, I'm a big believer in specialization and minimizing context-switching - with effective communication, a team where one individual largely focuses on product and the others largely focus on development seems more effective than a team where product responsibilities are divided evenly between the developers. (I suspect that's a minority opinion around here, though.)