[whstl]

That makes me think.

I never really worked with a PM that was good at preventing wasted effort. Or even mediocre at it. Most assumptions I saw them making were incorrect, unless it was a VERY SIMPLE product.

To me this is something that engineering should be doing, just like splitting tasks and double-checking designs.

Of course not every engineer can do it, but some of us have been doing it, negotiating deadlines and deliverables our whole careers. So I don't really understand why our industry insists on having us throw away those abilities.

[anon84873628]

On the other hand, I've seen engineers make unilateral decisions that had completely unacceptable UX or ops impacts, that didn't align to the original design spec, and that they didn't think to tell anyone about until way down the road.

Everyone needs a counterpart to "trust but verify".

At my company, engineering managers are ultimately responsible for the deadlines and deliverables. It's an anti-pattern for PMs to also be the project managers - that is a bad combo and it should either be owned by the EMs or a dedicated role.

[whstl]

Sure, but my point is that certain tasks that people believe to be the responsibility of PMs is better done by engineers, IME.

And your example is also a good one, I totally agree, PMs managing deadlines is also not a good idea.

[conrs]

Yes, I feel like most Product Managers I’ve worked with are more like Project Managers - all about deadlines, largely just accepting requirements rather than refining, etc.

[conrs]

That and having knowledge of the constraints helps us build the best systems. Often I’ll see Product decide an initiative is a 2 quarter affair, then from then on it is always in the backlog, never to be worked on. Meanwhile we could deliver the first increment of value next week with a little strategy applied - had we even been consulted.

[munksbeer]

Frankly, for me, the best value product managers can provide is being the buffer and/or unblocker. I want other team C to do task X, because it unblocks my team and others, but somehow I can't convince team C to do it. Well, that becomes the product managers job. They _should_ know the path to delivery and understand why this is important and negotiate with team C to drop other stuff to deliver X. And they can tell anyone above team C why this is happening. And I have worked with some product managers like that, but unfortunately they are rare, and most just get bullied by stronger willed (obstinate) tech teams. It isn't an easy job.

I'm quite fortunate that at the moment I have a great relationship with all of our peer teams and we generally sort it out amongst ourselves. We don't have a product manager involved at all for the last few years.