[edderly]

The best product manager I worked with was just an exceptionally bright person, they were able to understand complexity of implementation (and even have a reasonable chance of doing it themselves) vs understanding the business need. Just basically a value add to the company without being an engineering manager.

Unfortunately most product managers are just people who sit in the role. They are just gatekeepers who take either credit or blame. They often have little skin in the game.

Overall, if you have a product management organisation, you're doing it wrong.

[strix_varius]

> Overall, if you have a product management organisation, you're doing it wrong.

Agreed, the best (and most successful) products I've worked on have all had product ownership by actual implementers (engineers, designers, customer success, etc). I loved being on the support rotation as an engineer because it closed the gap of abstraction between my work and the real humans who were using it every second.

Very rarely, I have worked with PMs who add net positive value, and in every case they would have made okay engineers as well.

[phillipcarter]

> Overall, if you have a product management organisation, you're doing it wrong.

I've found myself on both sides of this issue in my career and I've landed on it being a good thing to have a PM organization, assuming your entire org is large enough.

The main reason why is that when PM (or whoever plays that role in a team) reports up to the same engineering management chain, all things eventually bias towards the needs of engineering. Much-needed feature work that is likely to advance the business eventually always gets de-prioritized because there's always tech debt or infrastructure work that inhibits people in some way. Sometimes it's actually the right move to do that, but you need tension between two orgs that have equal chairs at the table to make that kind of call. That ends up not happening when it's a part of engineering.

Of course a lot of the sad reality in our industry is that separate PM orgs get to have more power than engineering orgs because they get to own "what's good for the business", and when you combine that with a bunch of PMs who know how to follow a process or framework but don't actually understand their own products or users, you get a nightmare.