Ah product teams. I'd be convinced it is a jobs program for overqualified ivy league grads, and as a SWE I thought that for a while, but a GREAT product and/or

Ah product teams. I'd be convinced it is a jobs program for overqualified ivy league grads, and as a SWE I thought that for a while, but a GREAT product and/or project manager is worth their weight in gold. That being said most of them I've worked with in FAANG/FAANGlike are meh to terrible. Product really suffers from the worst part of being a manager, where you don't control the outcome of other people's work, with the ability to blame shift a lot easier than being a manager since you're managing a product not people. This also makes them super mercurial and since they can move around a lot. It's doubly an issue, bc a good/great engineering team can compensate for dumb product decisions or timelines with crunch and overtime that destroys the team. Product manager can say see what a good job I did, and then dip to another team before any of the consequences are realized. They end up doing tons of useless CYA type stuff that gunks up the works under tight deadlines. 90% of PMs I've worked with paid lip service to "unblocking" you, but at best would function as an email relay. That said, great PMs are fucking fantastic at large orgs. Project managers: know who to talk to, when to escalate quickly, get everyone on the same page including bad managers, unblock engineering by dealing with all the status update bullshit. Build reasonable timelines, fight scope creep, hold people accountable, and do reasonable amounts of CYA to make disputes quick. Product managers: Do fantastic market research w/ rigorous testing, constantly talking to users, building a consensus on the team on the product vision instead of just throwing commandments to the engineers. Focuses on the important features that drive impact instead of throwing the kitchen sink in there, takes feedback from engineering on the product, and pulls everyone's work into the view of leadership. EDIT: One more critical thing PMs should do is be able to get tradeoffs and make a business decision. Under a tight deadline should we prioritize the feature working w/ constraints or delay further. Maybe another blog post.