[emdowling]

It sounds like this person has worked with some truly mediocre product managers. I’m a PM, from a self-taught engineering background, and I’ve worked with many mediocre folks too across all disciplines.

I view my job primarily as risk management. A great team of engineers and designers will face a huge number of risks to shipping great products, like not having the right skill set to articulate their vision to get others on board, or having lawyers impose requirements or restrictions on what can and cannot be done. My job is to manage that, to help bring out the best in the team so they can get on with the actually important work of building and shipping great products.

I judge success by how redundant I am. My goal is to not be needed, for the team to have the right context, confidence and support to make good decisions without me.

I love working with engineers to level-up their skills so they can do just this; I work with my EM partners to understand the strengths, weaknesses and goals of each engineer, and try and find ways I can help them progress.

In an ideal, utopian world maybe I’m not needed. I can understand that argument. But in most cases, doing truly great things will run up against challenges and risks, and a good PM works in partnership with their team to overcome them and is a net value add.

[bazmattaz]

I’m a PM too and I agree; I judge how good a job I’m doing by how smooth everything runs for my team - how they have everything they need to do their best work, they have all the context, requirements, insight, metrics, goals….etc they have an understanding of what problem they’re trying to solve who we’re solving it for and crucially why we need to solve it.

A good PM creates an environment where engineers like OP thinks the PM is not needed because “PMs do nothing” or whatever. It’s short sighted and frankly insulting