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I'm skeptical of the role of PMs – it often feels like a lossy communication layer between stakeholders, and engineering has to get involved in some level of de

I'm skeptical of the role of PMs – it often feels like a lossy communication layer between stakeholders, and engineering has to get involved in some level of detail to understand what has to be built anyway. I would rather encourage engineers to get involved and understand the domain and the project than rely on this role.

phillipcarter 4y ago
> I would rather encourage engineers to get involved and understand the domain and the project than rely on this role. What confidence do you have that an engineer would be less lossy in this role? It's a full-time thing when done right.
dboreham 4y ago
PM is just an adult you need when the developers are...
juancn 4y ago
A good PM is an advocate for the customer, but the role also ends up having to balance needs from Engineering and company vision. If you work with a great PM, it's fantastic. They can bring clarity to product in a way no other role can.
tlogan 4y ago
One of the most important role of PMs is to tell the team what not to implement. Or which feature to remove. I worked with a couple of good PMs which were good at that: and product and profits really improved. The worse PMs are the one which just say: customer x wants y - we need to implement y. Without thinking of market landscape, future, training costs, etc.
nlh 4y ago
It's good to be skeptical, but I think the role is critical if done right. Someone described a good PM as "a conductor keeping the orchestra in sync". And even as you described - someone needs to be the layer to gather feedback from customers, make sure it's feasible to build, decide what to build vs. what not to build and when, make sure executives are happy, keep the designers on track and focused, etc. If that layer is lossy, then you simply have a bad PM (which doesn't mean there should be NO pm, it just means you need a better one.) Do you as an engineer want to be doing design reviews and giving feedback on page layout and usability? Do you want to be on 20 customer calls talking about the business, showing demos, and getting feedback? Do you want to present to the board what your next few releases are going to look like? Do you want to maintain a product strategy so that you have a source of truth to answer "should we build this?" You may say "yes" for some of those some of the time, and that's great and important. But if you're saying "yes" to all of that all of the time, then congrats, you're not actually a full-time engineer, you're a PM who knows how to code :)
mason55 4y ago
> engineering has to get involved in some level of detail to understand what has to be built anyway Of course, that's a big part of the role for a senior engineer. But if you're building a real product, and not just a collection of random one-off features that customers ask for explicitly, then there's a whole set of work that needs to be done to enable good decision-making. It starts with defining who your customers are and what are the problems you're trying to solve for them. It goes all the way through gathering feedback from customers in a meaningful way. > I would rather encourage engineers to get involved and understand the domain and the project than rely on this role. The fact that you use the word "project" is interesting. If someone comes to you and says "here's a project I need you to build for me" (could be custom development for an external customer, could be an internal stakeholder who gets to dictate custom development) then the role of product manager doesn't make sense. If, instead, you're building something based on a need that you believe the market isn't meeting, then the role of product manager makes a lot more sense. The product manager IS the stakeholder in this case. They are the one identifying unmet needs in the market, possible customers, business problems to solve, etc. For a team trying to build something new that is expected to be sold to lots of customers, just the part of defining the market is hugely valuable, because it gives the team a starting point to evaluate any solutions they come up with.
ako 4y ago
Main role of the PM is to prioritize: what get build/shipped first, what later, what not? To do this a PM has to balance and understand the needs of the customers, the potential customers, the direction of the company, the direction of the market, the capabilities of the competition. The engineering details are better left to the software engineers, architects, key users and UXers.

phillipcarter 4y ago

> I would rather encourage engineers to get involved and understand the domain and the project than rely on this role. What confidence do you have that an engineer would be less lossy in this role? It's a full-time thing when done right.

dboreham 4y ago

PM is just an adult you need when the developers are...

juancn 4y ago

A good PM is an advocate for the customer, but the role also ends up having to balance needs from Engineering and company vision. If you work with a great PM, it's fantastic. They can bring clarity to product in a way no other role can.

tlogan 4y ago

One of the most important role of PMs is to tell the team what not to implement. Or which feature to remove. I worked with a couple of good PMs which were good at that: and product and profits really improved. The worse PMs are the one which just say: customer x wants y - we need to implement y. Without thinking of market landscape, future, training costs, etc.

nlh 4y ago

It's good to be skeptical, but I think the role is critical if done right. Someone described a good PM as "a conductor keeping the orchestra in sync". And even as you described - someone needs to be the layer to gather feedback from customers, make sure it's feasible to build, decide what to build vs. what not to build and when, make sure executives are happy, keep the designers on track and focused, etc. If that layer is lossy, then you simply have a bad PM (which doesn't mean there should be NO pm, it just means you need a better one.) Do you as an engineer want to be doing design reviews and giving feedback on page layout and usability? Do you want to be on 20 customer calls talking about the business, showing demos, and getting feedback? Do you want to present to the board what your next few releases are going to look like? Do you want to maintain a product strategy so that you have a source of truth to answer "should we build this?" You may say "yes" for some of those some of the time, and that's great and important. But if you're saying "yes" to all of that all of the time, then congrats, you're not actually a full-time engineer, you're a PM who knows how to code :)

mason55 4y ago

> engineering has to get involved in some level of detail to understand what has to be built anyway Of course, that's a big part of the role for a senior engineer. But if you're building a real product, and not just a collection of random one-off features that customers ask for explicitly, then there's a whole set of work that needs to be done to enable good decision-making. It starts with defining who your customers are and what are the problems you're trying to solve for them. It goes all the way through gathering feedback from customers in a meaningful way. > I would rather encourage engineers to get involved and understand the domain and the project than rely on this role. The fact that you use the word "project" is interesting. If someone comes to you and says "here's a project I need you to build for me" (could be custom development for an external customer, could be an internal stakeholder who gets to dictate custom development) then the role of product manager doesn't make sense. If, instead, you're building something based on a need that you believe the market isn't meeting, then the role of product manager makes a lot more sense. The product manager IS the stakeholder in this case. They are the one identifying unmet needs in the market, possible customers, business problems to solve, etc. For a team trying to build something new that is expected to be sold to lots of customers, just the part of defining the market is hugely valuable, because it gives the team a starting point to evaluate any solutions they come up with.

ako 4y ago

Main role of the PM is to prioritize: what get build/shipped first, what later, what not? To do this a PM has to balance and understand the needs of the customers, the potential customers, the direction of the company, the direction of the market, the capabilities of the competition. The engineering details are better left to the software engineers, architects, key users and UXers.