[anon23anon]

I don't think so - I'm an insider and honestly to me the biggest amount of fluff is the all project manager/program manager/product owner/process owner types roles. Realistically you could put them all under the broad title of business analyst. From what I've seen a given engineering team will grown in size under a given director and the corresponding director on the product/business side will want to grow their side of the house equally and so they do and we end up w/ roughly a 1 to 1 ratio of developers to business analysts of some sort which is about what is cited here.

[ngc248]

Nowadays I am seeing enormous growth in product management orgs, product mgrs growing like crazy. In my company, we see that product orgs have ballooned a lot and product managers are also not helping that much. A lot of them don't have any product vision and just act like glorified project managers. I am not saying all are bad, I have seen some good ones, but seems like a lot of them are just there to take advantage of the growth.

[spfzero]

Many of the product managers I've worked with have a very simple job: Take the product management direction from some other, higher-up manager, and present it to the engineers. They don't actually manage anything, can't answer any serious questions, etc. They just save time for their manager by fronting for them, and insulating them from questions they'd prefer not to have to answer.

[throw1234651234]

This is an issue in smaller companies as well. A team's architect can generally cover technical architecture, business analysis, running scrum, writing stories better than the POs, etc. The fact though, is that one good "business person" to take over all that DOES help. Not so much when you get 3 roles (scrum master, BA, PO) all of which do about an hour of work a day and still blame everything on the devs.

[phillipcarter]

Sounds like a pretty rotten product org. Glad I haven't entertained recruiters for it. A good PM can really energize a team and bring vision and clarity to things. A mediocre or bad one just gets in the way.

[loceng]

Not a surprising conclusion based on how Facebook was founded and by whom.

[pc86]

It is surprising that FB would allow the business analysis side of the house to grow equally (or even at half the rate) engineering based on how Facebook was founded and by whom.

[hallway_monitor]

When someone has a team or an area they are responsible for, they will try to make that team and responsibity grow as much as possible, whether or not it's good for the organization. This is not obvious to the perpetrators.

[phillipcarter]

I don't really think Mark Zuckerberg is the source of having an aimless PM org. I think that he should serve jail time for wire fraud and overseeing a defective product that causes people harm. But I think that's disconnected from his abilities and vision as a founder, engineer, and creator of one of the most successful companies in the world.