[cloudking]

In my experience in multiple roles (product manager, project manager, software engineer) and dozens of successful launches with large engineering teams, the ideal kind of PM has a deep understanding of users, how software should work best for them AND technical experience.

The problem with a purely technical team and no user-centric PM guidance is they'll end up building an engineering designed product, that doesn't resonate with non-technical users. As pure engineers, we love engineering, and may over-engineer solutions given the opportunity. Unless we are building some developer tools or highly technical product, this doesn't work for the majority of non-technical products.

You need a PM who can separate the technical design from the user experience, but also understands how to bridge the two when it comes to actually building the product. No technical experience rarely helps, as you spend a lot of wasted time debating why things should or can't be built.

As a PM with technical background, I'm not going to waste engineering time proposing radical user experiences that I know will require excess resources and time to build. At the same time, deeply understanding what users want, I'm not going to build a product that is too technical for them to understand how to use. We understand the limits of our technical stack and how to reduce user frustration. That is the advantage of having a balanced PM with both user and technical experience.