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I don't think so - I'm an insider and honestly to me the biggest amount of fluff is the all project manager/program manager/product owner/process owner types roles. Realistically you could put them all under the broad title of business analyst. From what I've seen a given engineering team will grown in size under a given director and the corresponding director on the product/business side will want to grow their side of the house equally and so they do and we end up w/ roughly a 1 to 1 ratio of developers to business analysts of some sort which is about what is cited here.

discuss

ngc248|3 years ago

Nowadays I am seeing enormous growth in product management orgs, product mgrs growing like crazy. In my company, we see that product orgs have ballooned a lot and product managers are also not helping that much. A lot of them don't have any product vision and just act like glorified project managers. I am not saying all are bad, I have seen some good ones, but seems like a lot of them are just there to take advantage of the growth.

spfzero|3 years ago

Many of the product managers I've worked with have a very simple job: Take the product management direction from some other, higher-up manager, and present it to the engineers. They don't actually manage anything, can't answer any serious questions, etc. They just save time for their manager by fronting for them, and insulating them from questions they'd prefer not to have to answer.

throw1234651234|3 years ago

This is an issue in smaller companies as well. A team's architect can generally cover technical architecture, business analysis, running scrum, writing stories better than the POs, etc. The fact though, is that one good "business person" to take over all that DOES help. Not so much when you get 3 roles (scrum master, BA, PO) all of which do about an hour of work a day and still blame everything on the devs.

phillipcarter|3 years ago

Sounds like a pretty rotten product org. Glad I haven't entertained recruiters for it. A good PM can really energize a team and bring vision and clarity to things. A mediocre or bad one just gets in the way.

loceng|3 years ago

Not a surprising conclusion based on how Facebook was founded and by whom.