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> at other times, the priority will be to resolve some technical debt to make deployment faster; and so on It's interesting you mention this. In my experience,

> at other times, the priority will be to resolve some technical debt to make deployment faster; and so on It's interesting you mention this. In my experience, PMs have only owned end-user experience, they come up with end-user project prioritization. The consolidation of asks from various departments was instead done by dev managers/directors/VPs. So for example, a dev manager decides between a customer-facing feature and some tech debt to make deployments faster - contrasting short term deliverables with long term velocity of the team.

BerislavLopac 4y ago
> they come up with end-user project prioritization Then they have failed from the beginning. Technically, everything you do affects end-users - including faster deployments - although in some cases that effect is more obvious than in others. In a perfect world, each product (or, in a complex system, a well defined subset of features within a product) should have a dedicated representative of each of the "horses", who should agree on the priorities - with the product lead (thank you @Jenk!) guiding the process and helping resolve the conflicts.
- wobbly_bush 4y ago
  > Technically, everything you do affects end-users - including faster deployments - although in some cases that effect is more obvious than in others. I agree with this. This is why the dev managers/directors/VPs own the _delivery_ of the business goals for the year. They balance the customer-facing improvements with internal improvements which affect development velocity (deployments, ops, how easy is it for new employees to onboard onto a code base, how easy is it for someone with <2 years experience on a codebase to ship a feature, etc.). So PMs in collaboration with dev managers own _what_ customer-facing improvements to deliver, and the responsibility of _how_ to deliver and the actual delivery falls on the dev managers. I'm not proposing this as a new model, I'm saying this is what I've seen been followed in some companies.

BerislavLopac 4y ago

> they come up with end-user project prioritization Then they have failed from the beginning. Technically, everything you do affects end-users - including faster deployments - although in some cases that effect is more obvious than in others. In a perfect world, each product (or, in a complex system, a well defined subset of features within a product) should have a dedicated representative of each of the "horses", who should agree on the priorities - with the product lead (thank you @Jenk!) guiding the process and helping resolve the conflicts.

wobbly_bush 4y ago
> Technically, everything you do affects end-users - including faster deployments - although in some cases that effect is more obvious than in others. I agree with this. This is why the dev managers/directors/VPs own the _delivery_ of the business goals for the year. They balance the customer-facing improvements with internal improvements which affect development velocity (deployments, ops, how easy is it for new employees to onboard onto a code base, how easy is it for someone with <2 years experience on a codebase to ship a feature, etc.). So PMs in collaboration with dev managers own _what_ customer-facing improvements to deliver, and the responsibility of _how_ to deliver and the actual delivery falls on the dev managers. I'm not proposing this as a new model, I'm saying this is what I've seen been followed in some companies.