[015a]

I think a major complaint surfaced about the PM role is: Its rare for even your PM to be an expert in that area. Ideally, they should be. Realistically, there's one guy in another branch of the company with a totally unrelated title that everyone eventually figures out is The Guy on this product domain; and the PM's role becomes "interface with Jim".

I don't generally find myself in the Anti-PM camp; but I think one of the valid criticisms of the role is that high quality hiring for it is so extremely difficult that maybe its existence is an indication of a structural problem. As the article says; if the ratio of PMs to Teams should be less than 1:1, maybe the correct lens to view this role through is more of a higher-level product lead, or a separate product branch who act more like free agents that attach themselves to teams temporarily, splitting time, where needed.

I will say, I've worked in two roles where this was the case; one a very large public tech company everyone reading this would recognize, and another a 30 person startup; giving PMs higher cross-team authority felt, to me, like a really good decision. One small positive byproduct I actively observed: when speaking with our PM, who was shared with four or five other teams, he was constantly aware of all the other work they were doing, and would actively make recommendations about how our little feature could plug-in with their little feature to increase the quality of the overall product. One small negative he communicated: because the company had no entry-level PM roles, which is where he started before they refactored the org chart, its non-obvious how you backfill these roles or create an entryway for new talent to breach the industry. Their current solution to this is "well, we can't really promote internally unless an EM or Engineer wants to switch domains" which they genuinely did try to support.