| > As a non-technical product manager having direct developer reports It’s nice that you want to help them but this is a huge red flag for your company. Product managers should not have engineers as direct reports. You’re either sacrificing your product work to spend time doing an engineering managers job, or sacrificing supporting your direct reports to do product work. No one is winning in this situation, certainly not your company, and they are not setting you up for success. Likely you’re really a project manager looking after a feature team of engineers, so no real product work is happening in this situation anyway. If I were you I would: a) stop developing new features right now. b) escalate the issue with this really bad team topology to whoever can fix it. Likely your CEO, if you have a CTO why don’t they care about supporting their engineers?
If you have a CPO / head of product, why are they not supporting you? c) only work on tech debt to keep your team busy and doing something useful for a few weeks while you figure out a way forward. d) you need to find someone with some role power who can hire people to support your department/team and get team set up properly. Ideally that means you no longer have any direct reports who are engineers. e) if they can’t figure this out you probably need to look for a different job because the experience you’re getting doing this isn’t really helping you grow as a PM. The very last thing I want my PM’s worrying about is directly managing engineers. |