[noobker]

>very likely your technical people are smarter than your product people

Intelligence is multifaceted. That business listens to product and not to engineers could be seen as a type of social intelligence of which engineers are notoriously unskilled.

Regardless, framing any portion of your organization as "smarter than" (implicitly "better than") isn't going to help in terms of fostering collaboration.

[MajimasEyepatch]

Also a lot of PMs are former engineers. One could argue a person capable of doing both at a high level is "smarter" than a person who cannot. Certainly they would have a unique perspective compared to people who have only been on one side or the other.

But like you said, intelligence is multifaceted, and comparing people's intelligence is pointless and divisive.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

PM is not product, when they get separated from technical in companies, they're literally product, as a team.

But more importantly, most of the time what happens is these people have 2, maybe 3 years of experience. They've done enough to be able to roughly understand technology, and that experience helps them communicate with the technical side, but in no way shape or form does that mean they would come anywhere close to that 20 year old vet on the development team.

But the flip side isn't true. In companies without that strong delineation between them, it's the 20 year old vet who would be doing what product is doing.

Companies who do this are too compartmentalized and they become extremely slow as a result. It's all in an effort to keep technical from having an outsized influence.

[sarchertech]

I have never understood why companies consistently hire people right out of college (often with random degrees unrelated to anything relevant) to tell a team of engineers with 10-20 years of experience what (and often how) to build.

Back when I was new, engineers worked directly with subject matter experts and the occasional business analyst. Now we’ve mostly replaced SMEs with product, and I don’t think it’s working out.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

> Back when I was new, engineers worked directly with subject matter experts and the occasional business analyst. Now we’ve mostly replaced SMEs with product, and I don’t think it’s working out.

Exactly this.

Not only that, but when it works the way you're describing, it's often a 2-way conversation. The developer strives to understand the goals, then starts making suggestions to determine if the business is ok with shortcomings that would make it a lot cheaper and faster, but would fulfill those goals. They'll also dig into what the business wants in the future so when the implementation starts they can take that into account.

Instead we get product who wants to own all of that and then throw things up into a jira ticket and have it magically be great. There's no value add there.

[lliamander]

> Intelligence is multifaceted. That business listens to product and not to engineers could be seen as a type of social intelligence of which engineers are notoriously unskilled.

To some extent that's true. I'm sure that product folks tend to have higher verbal intelligence (on average). But all forms of intelligence are highly correlated with each other, and engineers are likely higher overall. Many (though not all) of the engineers I know are quite articulate, even when English isn't their first language.

Much of the difference in "social intelligence" might just come down to being more outgoing and assertive, rather than an actual difference in ability.

> Regardless, framing any portion of your organization as "smarter than" (implicitly "better than") isn't going to help in terms of fostering collaboration.

I agree that the other poster's framing was hostile, but I am sympathetic to their frustration. I think it is helpful to remind product and business leaders that your engineers can be great allies in solving hard business problems.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

It's not hostile, just a simple statement of fact.

These product teams aren't interested in collaboration, that's part of the point. A strong software developer can do products job better than they themselves can do it, but they get treated like code monkeys.

[wittycardio]

Yes it is multi faceted. But in this industry one of those facets is worth more.

[Nemi]

I am an engineer by trade, but I would argue product is more important than engineering. WHAT you work on is ultimately more important than HOW it is achieved from my experience. Yes, bad engineering will ruin a product, but it is all moot if you are not working on the right thing. So many companies I have worked with are working on the wrong thing. Another way to put it is, a company with a great product that has bad engineering will outperform a company that has great engineering but a bad product. Product/market fit rules all. Once I understood this I was able to work with the product team better.

[wittycardio]

Yeah I mean I work at a place that thankfully has no "product" team. That was a valuable thing at a certain place but it's been replicated needlessly and most product managers are glorified project managers with no power or responsibility.

[danielmarkbruce]

Does your company sell software products/services? Or you are building internal software/consulting?

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

^ and this attitude is _exactly_ why so many companies can't get anything done and why I explicitly pointed out that software developers tend to be smarter than your product people.

So lets be very clear on what I was saying.

software developers can do the job of product, product cannot do the job of software developers

It kills me how many people seem to think the doers are the least important part of it. Gamedev gets this right with the insistence that the idea guy is worthless.

I work as a software architect and I see this all the time.

[danielmarkbruce]

There are several things you might not see. Folks who have done both jobs will say this.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

It's not a job, it's a role, one that senior developers take on all the time.

It gets turned into a job and the result is business people constantly bitching about why everything is slow and what DOES get done is never what they wanted.

The phone game is real.

[danielmarkbruce]

It's a job of many roles and it's a crazy difficult job to do well at. I'd never do it again. Engineering feels like a cake walk in comparison.

[wittycardio]

Yeah product managers have a very high opinion of themselves lol. While a handful might be really valuable most are worse than worthless