That reminds me of the time I was heading the Product Management department of a large company. We had so many discussion about what a Product Owner, Manager, Technical Product Manager is. Their role. Their responsibilities. Endless discussion with much feelings involved about respect, ownership and so on. Nowadays I am convinced that a great company just doesn't need any PMs. It is way better to empower the tech and…
The challenge I've had with that model is that as a company gets more complex, having someone whose sole job is to focus on the business technology interface is invaluable as people start to specialize. It's often more valuable to have engineers with (say) 6/10 expertise in the business and 10/10 expertise in their technology domain, working alongside PMs with 10/10 expertise in the business and 6/10 expertise in the…
That being said, product mindedness is hard for engineering teams. 2 of the teams I work with, I am giving them inputs on every single feature they need to build. While I dislike doing this for every feature, its upto how the engineering leader envisions their team to function. For some, unless there are jira tickets, properly prioritized, with designs ready, they dont want to involve engineering teammates.