| No problem! A colleague and I actually write a lot about these types of topics (link in bio) if you're curious. A few quick reactions: "It seems there is a spectrum of maturity/complexity (correlated with age and scale)" 100%, I don't think that early stage companies really need PMs, and IMO PMs at early stages can be actively harmful by causing overhead / trying to make themselves useful and failing. At early stages the founders/engineers/designers/even some sales or support people should fill the necessary parts of product management. Product management at this stage can be more like a set of activities that produces good decisions, rather than a formal department. (Fwiw the company I work at has many hundreds of employees) "there are orgs that expect PMs to be (or become) business domain experts and orgs that expect PMs to be highly-educated secretary-task-masters" Yeah, the latter is kind of terrible I think. If you need secretaries or task masters you should probably hire engineers/designers (and management) that can keep the trains running on time or set up mgmt processes to do so automatically. PMs ideally only get involved in project management because they have the skills and they're incentivized by outcomes to roll their sleeves up when needed, not because it's part of their core job. Good PMs also don't want to primarily do admin project management work, so (to bring it all back to your first comment) you'll end up with crappy PMs who are strictly less knowledgeable than your engineers. |