Engineering management is only bullshit if the managers are not potential target users of the product, since a manager needs to deeply understand how the produc

Engineering management is only bullshit if the managers are not potential target users of the product, since a manager needs to deeply understand how the product gets experienced by its end users. Note that this does not mean that non-technical people cannot be engineering managers; it just means that they cannot manage technical products. Thus, you cannot have effective nontechnical managers for products intended for technical people (e.g. IDEs, sysadmin tools, etc.), but technical managers for products intended for general audiences (e.g. email, office applications, etc.) are perfectly fine (and perhaps even better, since they provide a much needed nontechnical perspective to highly technical developers).