[idopmstuff]

> He PMd 2 other tech teams the same way.

I'm with you that all of this is bad PM work, but this seems to be the root cause. I've been at a startup like this where there weren't enough PMs to start and then a couple left, which just led to the rest being stretched across more teams.

You just can't do much of anything useful in this situation - your existence consists of preparing for and attending stakeholder meetings. I guess some people thrive on the pseudo-glorified existence of "managing" a bunch of different teams, but I found it to be as miserable as you seem to have found it from the eng side. I was there to spend time with customers and designers and engineers, and after a few months of doing none of those things, I quit without a job lined up.

Once you get to that point, it can become even worse because you end up in this doom loop of management realizing that the core PM work is getting delegated to eng, thinking that this means they don't need as many PMs and then delegating more work to eng.

[Jensson]

> Once you get to that point, it can become even worse because you end up in this doom loop of management realizing that the core PM work is getting delegated to eng, thinking that this means they don't need as many PMs and then delegating more work to eng.

At least that is better than eng doing the PM work and the PM getting all the credit for it.

[steveBK123]

Exactly. "Oh no, the team doing all the work and covering for the other team is going to get the incremental resource increases".

Yes. If a team is incapable of either doing their job or in advocating for needing more resources to do their job, then they do not get to have more resources. Particularly when another team is covering for this gap, typically, engineering.

It never goes the other way right? How many times are PMs picking up JIRA tickets, handling bug fixes, joining on-call rotas, etc type tasks that engineering does?

If non-engineering roles/orgs are created to take load of engineering, and are incapable of doing so, then they need not exist. This goes for DevOps/CloudOps/SRE/Support/QA/Product/Project Mgmt/etc.

You can run a lean startup consisting entirely of 3 engineers. But you can't run a lean startup consisting entirely of 3 SRE/QA/Product/whathaveyou.

This is not a knock on these other orgs/roles. In a well functioning shop, they are essential. But when orgs like Product forget that the tail doesn't wag the dog.. bad things follow for everyone.