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This certainly sounds like your company is having a gap. But the gap sounds to me more like the lack of technical leadership (a strong lead, principal engineer,

This certainly sounds like your company is having a gap. But the gap sounds to me more like the lack of technical leadership (a strong lead, principal engineer, etc) than a PM. 10 out of 10 PMs I worked with (and it had been more) wouldn't commend on software architecture and internals and wouldn't prevent the needless complexity and unmaintainability aspects. They can at most point out that feature development and bugfixes are too slow, and then its up to the engineering team to improve on this. But also for 10 out of 10 PMs feature development will always be too slow, since customers are asking for things being done yesterday, so this alone isn't a great indicator that engineering is broken. APIs using different TLS versions falls into the same category. Unless the TLS version is part of the product (which is the case for e.g. API Gateways, webservers and proxies) PMs will likely not care. They should however care about the difference between no TLS at all and a "somewhat modern TLS", because "no security" is definitely an important gap in the product.

snapetom 3y ago
A lack of engineering leadership is certainly true. As is often told, the VP of engineering enjoyed creating PRs more than actually leading. There has never been an architect. The point is though, product never challenged on approaches, and you’re right. They never came from technical backgrounds. Product managers were promoted from the BA ranks. They never raised technical questions like that - “Is it a bad thing if the customer has to connect this way for this API and another way for another API?” If the idea is that engineering asks those questions, I’d counter with that’s venturing squarely into product’s realm.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  I don't claim greatness at modern product design/theory, but I'd expect "what version(s) of TLS are supported?" to be primarily an engineering responsibility (say 80-90%) versus a product concern (say 10-20%).
d0gsg0w00f 3y ago
I think that most "good" engineering managers share the same traits as good Product Managers. - Someone to understand the customer's desires and shut down unnecessary work. - Drive the team to deliver features that the customers/business actually needs. - drive tech decisions to prevent future inoperability with other products - roadshow and maintain a team's reputation across the org - etc
jahewson 3y ago
I agree. Founders who are bad engineers surround themselves with non-technical people who don’t question them.
360walk 3y ago
If TLS version support was materially affecting your client’s ability to integrate with your products’ APIs then the Product Manager should have picked this up and worked with the development team on a way to remove this friction. I can think of a bunch of different ways of solving this that would take a few days to build out.

snapetom 3y ago

A lack of engineering leadership is certainly true. As is often told, the VP of engineering enjoyed creating PRs more than actually leading. There has never been an architect. The point is though, product never challenged on approaches, and you’re right. They never came from technical backgrounds. Product managers were promoted from the BA ranks. They never raised technical questions like that - “Is it a bad thing if the customer has to connect this way for this API and another way for another API?” If the idea is that engineering asks those questions, I’d counter with that’s venturing squarely into product’s realm.

sokoloff 3y ago
I don't claim greatness at modern product design/theory, but I'd expect "what version(s) of TLS are supported?" to be primarily an engineering responsibility (say 80-90%) versus a product concern (say 10-20%).

d0gsg0w00f 3y ago

I think that most "good" engineering managers share the same traits as good Product Managers. - Someone to understand the customer's desires and shut down unnecessary work. - Drive the team to deliver features that the customers/business actually needs. - drive tech decisions to prevent future inoperability with other products - roadshow and maintain a team's reputation across the org - etc

jahewson 3y ago

I agree. Founders who are bad engineers surround themselves with non-technical people who don’t question them.

360walk 3y ago

If TLS version support was materially affecting your client’s ability to integrate with your products’ APIs then the Product Manager should have picked this up and worked with the development team on a way to remove this friction. I can think of a bunch of different ways of solving this that would take a few days to build out.