[phillipcarter]

> Overall, if you have a product management organisation, you're doing it wrong.

I've found myself on both sides of this issue in my career and I've landed on it being a good thing to have a PM organization, assuming your entire org is large enough.

The main reason why is that when PM (or whoever plays that role in a team) reports up to the same engineering management chain, all things eventually bias towards the needs of engineering. Much-needed feature work that is likely to advance the business eventually always gets de-prioritized because there's always tech debt or infrastructure work that inhibits people in some way. Sometimes it's actually the right move to do that, but you need tension between two orgs that have equal chairs at the table to make that kind of call. That ends up not happening when it's a part of engineering.

Of course a lot of the sad reality in our industry is that separate PM orgs get to have more power than engineering orgs because they get to own "what's good for the business", and when you combine that with a bunch of PMs who know how to follow a process or framework but don't actually understand their own products or users, you get a nightmare.