[Phenix88be]

> Good PMs know how to gatekeeper from other departments and leadership, identify engineers strengths and defer to their expertise, and remember answers to the same technical questions so they can at least build upon their knowledge of the craft. I have no clue how rare they are, but those are what I try to do on a regular basis on top of disseminating information as it changes from product stakeholders to engineering.

Good PM, yes, they can. But how does that required any kind of skill than have more value than an engineer skill ? I haven't met any good PM in 7 years and 3 jobs... It's kind of sad really.

[brayhite]

The value of the skill is relative. Some places may have incredible technical talent in their engineering team, but the team doesn’t know an SEO optimization from a consistent UI architecture.

In my opinion, a PM is a jack of all trades, and a master at communication and organization. Engineers on Team A who can identify why Feature A has dependencies on Feature B that Team B is building is awesome; but that’s the accepted exception. I’d also argue there’s a case that an engineer’s time should be spent building and writing code, not managing the release schedule to best meet business goals. Leave that to the PMs.

[Phenix88be]

> I’d also argue there’s a case that an engineer’s time should be spent building and writing code, not managing the release schedule to best meet business goals. Leave that to the PMs.

They will manage the schedule based on what the engineers estimations (and try to push for a better release date).

Any way, good PM must exist and add value to a team. But most of them don't know what they are doing... It's really painful.