More product, fewer product managers

Who is bonusing who?

I think some people simply can't get rid of the idea that there has to be some external paternalistic figure that looks over developers' shoulder and guides the poor hapless saps and their incentives. Do they give candy to the good boys/girls and coal to the bad ones? You might be thinking of Santa.

The developers and sre's incentives are the same as everybody else in the company: have a great, easy to sell, popular and reliable product. Management types insisting to compartmentalize incentives is them trying to have an excuse for their own existence.

We should all drag ourselves kicking and screaming to the reality that we can do much more with much less management layers. Even big companies, which are bloated beyond saving, are waking up to that fact. PMs are the first to go, just look at what Meta, a notoriously inefficient company is doing to their non technical PMs.

Think for a second why nobody has had the idea of letting an engineer be a 'Marketing Project Manager' of the marketing team and be calling the shots what campaigns to run, what marketing materials to produce, and make marketers estimate with poker cards how many of their leads will turn to a sale. Sounds stupid, right? Yet this is exactly what you want us to accept the other way around. Not gonna happen.

There is no excuse to have non engineers embedded in and actually calling the shots on behalf of an engineering team with the patronizing though that the engineers can't decide for themselves what to build and how to prioritize it.

I can most certainly and confidently tell you that a dedicated QA team that only does testing is a total waste of money! A sre/platform team building fuzzy testing tools and mandating better testing practices is money much better spent.

The developers MUST care for the quality, not outsource it to some external team. The desire of large corps to spend huge amount of $$$ to create artificial roles to water down ownership can never cease to astonish me.

If your devs can't think of handling nulls or corner cases, you got a skill problem, and you should ASAP upskill the devs, not outsource thinking to another tea.

Making quality somebody else's problem is the exact opposite of ownership! You want agile? Damn leave the devs alone, stop building walls around them and the product they are building!

> But most of them seem to think they can operate entirely in document-land and just crank out roadmap docs and keep stakeholder alignment via endless check-ins and nagging. They are doing a "project manager" job instead.

They are not managing product, they are managing stakeholders

This is the only sand way to go. It's surprising how many places just don't have PMs, or have far too many PMs (also applies to QA, junior engineers, senior engineers, architects, HR personnel, Vice Presidents, salespeople, etc.)

> How often do you have a Product Manager who is an expert in regulatory/compliance laws and has contacts with government agencies?

> Usually the Product Manager is Josh, who just finished uni, and a two weeks product manager course. They will have to ask experts, and then translate that to the devs. It's much more efficient to let the devs ask the experts, which will let the devs themselves become well versed in the domain over time.

I have definitely seen this happen, but as a very senior engineer, now PM, I can tell you this is a management/hiring failure much more so than anything else. I have long advocated that PMs /must/ be technical to be successful and, maybe more importantly, useful.

If you’re in an industry that is compliance encumbered, you should absolutely expect that your PMs are experts or at least professionally competent in the compliance standards you need to meet, or at minimum intellectually and contextually capable of getting there rapidly.

Hiring someone just out of college to be a PM is a huge red flag that your organization doesn’t understand the role of a PM, and that your upper level management is likely incompetent also. Without significant prior experience in some related facet to the product, it is not possible to be successful as a PM, and I wouldn’t expect a new grad to be able to do much more than push papers. PMs should always be former practitioners, if possible, but at least technically competent at minimum.