[NickC25]

I get that.

I think that it can be a mixed bag, especially depending on the size of your team and what you're trying to accomplish....and just as important - what role your PM actually fills on a day-to-day basis. PM has evolved to be a very vague description of many different needs a business actually has (some tech, some not) that nobody is specifically doing already.

My own experience as a PM - I worked at an education software startup. I was on a very small team with 3 engineers, a CTO, an operations person, and a CEO who was more of a market development / bizdev type of person. I was made PM almost by default. There was nobody regularly engaging with our users on a regular basis, nobody from our team actually using our product, nobody making sure we were building what we (and our customers) wanted to build, and nobody that understood the competition or the market we were serving. That's the PM role I filled - part tech, part biz, part UX, part design. My main value-add was that I knew the industry (and niche within the industry) well, and had personal experience at both sides of the product from a usecase prespective well before we even built it.

At other companies, this could be a much more limited role, or much greater role depending on the needs of the company.

I'm not super technical but have done coding bootcamps, know the right tech questions to ask, understand what engineers are capable of and how long things take; and most importantly - how to tell non-technical people to stop bothering the technical people. I do think PMs should be able to code, or at least know enough to ask questions, call out BS, know what's possible and what isn't, and how to get non-technical management to stop micro-managing the software development lifecycle. People skills are important too.

As I said earlier, PM has evolved into a catch-all that nobody can quite describe because it fills a slightly different niche at every different organization. The problem just gets worse when you hire fresh grads or people with 1-2 years of consulting experience who don't have any background whatsoever.

[smashah]

Don't get me wrong, a great PM is a godsend but few and far between. Unfortunately, a bad PM has a big negative impact to a team.

> The problem just gets worse when you hire fresh grads or people with 1-2 years of consulting experience who don't have any background whatsoever.

Yeah these are the culprits of the trend and the source of most rubbish PMs. The undefined is where these waste-chameleons lurk.

I highly suggest reading the aforementioned book (or even listening to the audio book).