What do you think? #tech #google #amazon #meta #apple #pm #product #productmanagers
OP is clearly a L4
Is engineering going to talk to stakeholders and deal with their unruliness? What about when leaders ask for an update why a project is behind schedule or if they can feature creep? Can they politely say no without actually saying ānoā? What about positioning the product to the market, engineering going to sit with marketing to walk through the competitive advantages? Review the competitive analysis? Go on sales calls? Deal with harsh negative customer feedback? Who will console engineering when direct feedback is that their application is too slow or hacky-like? Watch that snow cone melt in the sun and beg for a cover.
The answer is: it depends. Is the lead engineer also a great product person? Then maybe not. This is exceedingly rare in my experience. Is this a startup or scaled up org? The larger the team, the more specialization is required to scale. Is the PM doing actual product work? E.g. talking to customers, uncovering pain points and value drivers, or are they operating like a scrum master? Are customers happy with the product? Is it growing? Or are customers unhappy? Are features being released that donāt seem to move the business forward? Can you actually monetize any of the recent innovations?
What you say makes sense. However everything you described can be done by the team itself, without the need of a middle(wo)man.
We need PMs who have strong technical / Eng background. The PM interview sloop should be: L(n-1) SWE loop + 3 additional PM rounds. Current PM interview is a joke. If a PM canāt study to solve medium LC and pass system design round, then they are not qualified to be hired into this highly prestigious leadership role.
That would help.
L(n-1) SWE round is interesting and probably valuable. At the same time, though, thereās a difference between being able to design a system and being able to have the right conversation at the right time with an eng leader who is literally an expert in system design. If your PM is making technical system architecture decisions on their own, or your technical leadership is overruled/not involved, you have an organizational problem.
Maybe. Is your team going to take responsibility if they end up making something that requires other teams to do more work to adapt or goes down some tech/biz/ops dead end and has to backtrack? To avoid that youll be doing a lot of meetings/comms on top of your work. Sounds like maybe you want the role, so volunteer to do that on some project/program. The way you choose to express yourself in the thread is making some people suspect you're being naive, but your peers and manager know you better, and if they think you can actually do the PM they would probably make room for you to do the stretch. As far as every dev group being able to do it, it would already be that way if that were so. Devs get paid a lot and they could save a lot of money getting rid of all the PMs Most people dont check all the boxes, but some do. If you are one, you actually should try everything and kill at it. People like that can pick their job, and will have great careers and all the trappings
Software engineers often times lack enough EQ to be customer facing unfortunately
How does ETA tracking PMs help with that. We need highly skilled, experience and educated person with high EQ to deal with customers, understand requirements and do other things required in a PM role. Unfortunately most PMs are very low skilled and are only there since they get lured by high tech salaries and donāt do any work thatās expected of them.
Before tech got bloated, the PMs I worked with were intensely knowledgable and respected in their previous industries. They could navigate through any legal/regulatory complexities, find niche opportunities for growth, prioritize the work for maximum impact, and kept up on the latest developments on the field. Nowadays, engineers just babysit the PMs.
Yep. I can actually see value in PM that have strong technical background. Unfortunately they are too few to be relevant.
I would argue the best PMs are not usually the most technical, but rather those who have the deepest domain knowledge in their industry and the best understanding of customer problems. Great PMs bring clarity and focus to teams. They say no to bad ideas. They force prioritization based on impact. They are the experts on customer needs. Unfortunately big tech hired too many and often with fancy degrees over deep understanding of their domains. Instead of leading product decisions, they check up on engineers and report to leadership or they spend all their time on stakeholder management since they no longer have the authority needed to do their jobs well. TL;dr we need fewer stronger PMs who are worth their weight in gold. Great PMs understand their market deeply and understand tech well enough to know what is feasible.
As someone both technical and has worked as a PM, I always find these arguments dumb. The main reason is that ultimately, much of the work that PMs are doing... SOMEONE has to do. Yes, an engineer or UX person could do the tasks, but most of those tasks need to get done. Sure, an engineer can interview customers to help figure out what to build, analyze competitors, help set pricing, review the market for opportunities, put on roadmap presentations for stakeholders, meet with enterprise customers to help answer questions, etc. But all of that would simply just reduce the amount of time they could actually write code. So yes, you can get a developer to do these tasks, but they likely then will only be about 50-60% as effective as they were before vs hiring someone else to do this stuff. Everytime my company lets a dev team go wild for a couple of sprints without PMs to "innovate", they end up building either a bunch of stuff that other teams have already built or in progress, or they build stuff that is pointless to ship. Sure, you can argue they didn't have enough time to research what they SHOULD build, but the point is that nearly every single time I see engineering teams do hackathons or quick innovation style sprints we get zero value out of it because they didn't build the right things.
Even if PMs donāt drive innovation, they do organize work and make decisions (or at least get the decision made) which is important in big companies where there are lots of competing priorities
Are you suggesting that PMs are somehow involved in discussing/proposing or even deciding priorities? Lol
I work on a team that's responsible for products that drive over $1 billion in annual revenue for Microsoft. PM absolutely owns prioritization. That's literally our job.