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Unfortunately I’ve seen most project managers, BAs, and product managers that have no understanding of the VOC, requirements, or the engineering. Very common: Product managers typically come from sales/business development and can’t articulate VOC or requirements in an intelligible way, even though that may be a listed duty of theirs. They are great at taking their customer base to the baseball game and knocking back a few beers, but engineering ultimately has to collect those insights on their own. Project managers that have only a PMP or a some kind of tangential management qualification treat every project the same way but do not have the technical understanding to be useful. In their eyes rushing schedules, gate clearing, and release trumps any other concerns and often the result is shipping a turd product with bare bones checkbox requirements (that they never actually appreciated, understood, or cared about) that flops. But they get to claim they navigated X number of product releases on their resume. Business analysts possess half the knowledge they need to be competent. You need expertise in the business, customers, products, requirements, research, and analytics (basically a step just below the base knowledge you need to do systems engineering without having the technicals to develop a systems solution). You usually get someone with just enough knowledge in one area of computer science, analytics, or business (but almost never a complete suite of knowledge to provide useful input into the process). Engineering is hard. It’s a mixture of multiple disciplines of knowledge and wearing many hats. What holds back engineering salaries is that management, sales, and business types compete with engineering to improve the bottom line, seeking to minimize/outsource the importance of technical solutions and maximize other methods/budgets like marketing gimmicks, cutting costs, and inserting processes in a kludge or bureaucratic manner with the illusion of accountability (I have never witnessed actual accountability) via their hierarchies being closer to executives and board members who tend to have a disproportionate influence on matters like budget for competent engineers. I have seen enough turd products released that do insurmountable damage to a company that I run if I detect the scent that engineering is treated as just another resource that translates requirements into shipped products and is not on equal footing and input as sales, business process, and management. |