[tristor]

I agree with this entirely. I'm a PM at a company which is under 300 employees where we were founded by engineers, and nearly every member of management from the executive team down to the ICs has an engineering background. I have an engineering background of 13 years before becoming a PM. Everybody at this company is looking at and trying to understand the customer's problem and identify the best solution, and internally we have very high knowledge transparency.

I have been in large organizations before as an engineer where the PMs were separated and basically set marching orders, but that's not the way smaller organizations operate.

High knowledge transparency directly translates to consensus building over dictatorial decision making and ensures that the engineers know why they're making a specific choice. I think our high-quality software clearly comes from this advantage.