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A comment on WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers. Parent comment

Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers by ryanSrich on Monday October 25, 2021 @07:53PM (#28994742)
> If that means the job falls on me instead, so be it.

Precisely this. I don’t know when “engineer” turned into “order taker”. There’s no reason to have a Product Manager define and engineers work. Good engineers are more than capable of defining their own work.

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Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers by tomnipotent on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @12:07AM (#28996281)
> There’s no reason to have a Product Manager define and engineers work

The PM isn't supposed to define features in isolation, but crystalize them into consensus between engineers and stakeholders the PM is accountable to.

If your PM isn't your peer, the org is setup wrong. Tech leadership should be helping define this, but people don't know what they don't know and so things end up with PM's becoming de-facto "team leads".

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