[xyzelement]

Was an engineer, eng manager and now PM.

The important point is that someone is thinking about product vision and how you are actually going to sell/deploy to market your stuff.

If engineers or eng managers were doing that consistently, the PM role would not need to exist.

The reality is that most of the old-school engineers used to do this. As the "aperture" for engineers widened, the ratio of engineers who can actually apply this relevance/business lens to their work has decreased significantly so you need someone whose job is to be accountable for the vision and actual ability to turn code output into dollars.

[trynewideas]

As someone who moved from an open-core, engineer-driven company to a closed-source, product-driven one - this is spot on. When this article says that startups used to not need PMs, it's true, it's just that the startups that were product-focused won and the ones that weren't were acquihired by the winners for their tools and engineers.

Whether product focus came from product-focused engineers or product-focused management, it didn't matter. "Startups didn't always need PMs" really means that before PMs, engineers used to have to be product- and value-focused - they had to care about customers and profitability - and more specifically the early engineers who worked for the winners were probably better at product focus than engineering.

Also, if tech PMs who haven't worked outside of tech before read this article and feel depressed or angry, remember that there are massive sectors - agencies, health care, construction, any level of government - that need tech-literate PMs to manage vendors and contractors. You'll be the only person who knows or cares what it's like to work in tech, which is often more than enough to ship projects. If you're not looking to become a product-focused developer (which, see above), then ride out this wave of anti-product sentiment outside of startups. I promise there's space out there.

[cyrilgrislain]

Agree. And you could argue that Founder(s), owners of the company AND product vision, should keep that role as long as possible. I see too many Founders relinquishing this role too early. One argument being: I need time to raise and recruit. True, but these having taken such massive proportions lately, Product has been delegated 'under' the Founders = 2nd priority by definition. Hence so many companies with millions in bank, over bloated teams, but not even clear PMF, let alone economic models. Economics should remain a core part of Product.

Another explanation is: we have seen a much bigger proportion of Founders with little experience in 'cross-functional work', 'integrative management' and 'user-led holistic thinking' experience. All critical to PMing. Big fund raises allowed to compensate for that, by recruiting PMs.

Again, lots of startups, at the right stage, need PMs. I am just seeing too many startups over staffed in PMs and Founders too far from this.