[danpalmer]

We have 4 "part time" product managers. Essentially, each one splits their time, roughly 50/50 between their discipline (marketing, fashion styling, warehouse optimisation, development) and being the product manager for the software we write for those areas in our company. They are not just stakeholders, they are PMs (in title and training). This has worked very well for us.

I actually think having a fully part time PM could be a very good thing for lots of very small startups (< 10 employees). I think many companies at that size don't fully realise the benefits of having a member of the team with those sorts of responsibilities, and in fact, might not have enough other people to saturate a PM's time.

The main downside I can foresee is that, as a developer, I often need to contact my PMs in order to clarify requirements or discuss issues that come up during implementation. This communication would be limited by a PM working part time, but a tendency to "over-communicate" as many do in fully remote companies could help to overcome this.

[thriveaway]

Thanks for your reply! I mostly agree. Saturating peoples time in a small team is usually quite easy though :).

How do you manage oversight over the different PMs at your company? Someone has to split development resources among the stakeholders and their requirements, no?

[danpalmer]

The PMs meet weekly to figure out resource allocation. Developers and designers mostly work in "pods" assigned to an area of the business (or a metric) for a few months so that they aren't shifting a lot, and so most of the resource allocation happens at that level rather than at the weekly level. We've only recently got to the size where that made sense though, while smaller we definitely needed to be able to shift dev time around more with more granularity.