The product manager role is a mistake

Yeesh, I am sorry this person has had such a bleak experience. By the end I took away that their core issues were with people that had: an excess of process, a lack of passion for craft, and a generally narrow outlook.

These are not the attributes I would associate with success or appreciation in any role.

I've been thinking about this as well, but from a different angle: the product manager role just feels too much weight for a single human being to shoulder. When my last company went through the exercise of writing down roles & and responsibilities, the PM's responsibilities ended up being something akin to "general contractor", or someone that does everything that's left over after responsibilities are split up across different team members. It's great when you find that outlier person who can handle this responsibility, but when you can't, the older model of having a team consisting of a business analyst, architect, engineering manager or project manager seems to work (although not in a very satisfying way).

Ultimately the issue is a lack of clear roles and responsibilities of a PM role defined, and a lack of accountability.

I agree with you that the "product org" is an entity that can become a political and bureaucratic entity rather than an enabler.

Personally, I think the Product role should be embedded within engineering teams and report up to the same leaders (level is debatable) so that a bad PM can be dealt with just like a bad engineer. Of course if your company can't get rid of bad engineers either, you have other problems.

Currently I work for a big tech company that mostly doesn't employ PM roles, so I can give a first hand take on this.

My feelings so far are mixed. I've worked in PM-heavy organizations before and I agree that those suck. But at the end of the day there is some work that a PM would do that still needs to be done. In my org that responsibility officially falls into Software Managers and Senior+ Developers.

For example, if you are leading an initiative for your team as a Senior Engineer, you are in charge of doing all the activities that a PM would otherwise do. For other activities, the Manager or Senior Manager of the team is in charge.

Suffice to say that as a developer this sucks. Not only you need to deliver your own work as an IC, but you need to coordinate other people and ensure that things get done. Not only this is extra work, but let's be honest, many developers don't have the skills to be effective PMs. It also makes inter-team collaboration difficult, since now you have to coordinate people that don't share a reporting structure with you.

Often this approach results in lack of ownership, lack of accountability, duplicated efforts or things falling between the cracks, and general disorganization. That being said, it tends to work well for small intra team initiatives involving a few people, since it removes the overhead of a PM and places control in the hands of builders. But for larger initiative, I'm not quite convinced it works.

, that you know of