A good product manager, having done their job, has provided the good engineer with enough information about goals, features, requirements, user profiles and so on that the good engineer can run with that information and build something kickass. In many cases, the good engineer has enough information that they can make informed decisions about things that were not covered by the PM, such as what color to paint the bike shed.
The opposite can happen too, of course, when the engineers focus on features that nobody actually wants. I think grandparent's point was that PMs aren't always a good cure for this problem.
in other words...
If the team is wildly dysfunctional, then bad things are going to happen.
This highlights exactly how badly she failed at Google. Many Google products are invidiually well-designed. Google makes lots of fantastic things. But the overall product line of Google has always been an incoherent mess, and is only now in the modern era of Plus and Android getting collectively organized.
And since a solid engineer can design a solid product, where does the Product Manager come in? The larger vision. The whole interconnectedness of their entire product line.
And Google sucked at that. Atrociously.
About 18 months we were acquired by a larger company which had product management in one business unit but not another. We were allowed to keep our PM structure. 18 months later, guess what units have the highest revenue? And guess what unit bled money?
Granted this is just my experience, and it's from an engineering POV.
A good engineer can do lots of things on their own, many of which are a poor use of their time.
Any engineer working on a sufficiently complex project will spend 100% of their time in meetings without a PM. Even if your average engineer is better at PMing than your average PM (a belief that requires some serious hubris), if the engineer is left with no time for building things then zero work gets done.
Well, that's just dysfunctional. If "stakeholders" are that demanding of peoples' time, then they are the problem.
If your culture isn't engineer-driven, you have bigger problems and the number of PMs you have becomes basically irrelevant.
Sure, for 1 or 2 stakeholders. What if there are dozens? Big projects have lots of requirements and lots of people to coordinate. This is not a small task that can just be hand-waved away.
> If your culture isn't engineer-driven..
Engineers are important and there are notable examples of companies being engineer driven, however you are dismissing the vast majority of companies with your statement. Considering a good chunk of startups are CRUD apps on top of a UI framework of some variety, I doubt many tech startups even need to be engineer driven these days.
if you have even a small team of say 5 engineers, it makes no sense for each to be their own PM (5 PM's).
i can't imagine what you think a PM does.
I'm not suggesting that anyone in the thread is conflating PM and PMO in this way, but it's a challenge for the profession and I wouldn't be surprised if given posters perspectives reflect different views on what the PM role is actually supposed to be the expert on. I don't think it's their fault. We use a hyper-generic name that is almost indistinguishable in full and acronym'd form. We also tend to write awful job postings, though that's a rant for another thread.
Except that PM is about hell of a lot more than PMing the work of an engineer. It is called "Product" management for a reason. Dealing with engineers is just 1 aspect of it.
You can supervise a technical team, do performance reviews, code reviews, mentor junior team members AND go out and talk to customers to build use cases and triage feature requests?
Good luck getting any sleep.
makes it easier to compete against you.
Second, in many tech companies, PMs outrank engineers and the commoditization of tech talent hasn't really gone away. It's just that the titular concept of the "executive" is out of style among the rising generation. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
A good engineer can PM his own work, and doesn't need someone else to tell him what color to paint the bike shed.