Gmail wasn't just built by a team of "engineers" that ate Yahoo's break fast. There was also a great designer and product manager on the team as well [1]. I hav

Gmail wasn't just built by a team of "engineers" that ate Yahoo's break fast. There was also a great designer and product manager on the team as well [1]. I have seen engineers hold the misstaken belief that a "heroic" engineer or team of engineers could out-box a traditional product team with an engineering manager, product manager, designer, and engineering lead, but it's just not the truth. Presumably, in your case, you're talking about an engineering manager. But you haven't mentioned if there's an engineering manager and no accompanying trained product manager. Engineering managers aren't formally trained in doing the hard work of talking to the customers to figure out what the market actually wants, so if leadership at your organization did not build it out to include this role, you would end up being in a tough spot. Based on you saying that your manager made the decision to build a random integration which had questionable value to the org it sounds like this was the case. Depending on the size of the team, an engineering manager may even be dead weight and engineers should report to a technical founder or GM. But regardless, you actually are making the case that more rather than less product ownership and management is necessary to ensure that a product isn't dead on arrival -- after all, the symptoms you mention are of poor prioritization and product discovery/strategy (symptoms of poor/nonexistant active product management) rather than of poor engineering management (endless tech debt, production outages, awful on-call support, inability for the team to deliver features, unrealistic delivery roadmaps causing endless late nights with poor quality and buggy software delivery, attrition and difficulty recruiting). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail#Internal_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail#Internal_deve...