[ryandrake]

I'll offer my take on it, as a recovering software engineer who moved over to the product side. The first thing you have to learn is that nobody works for you--you can't tell anyone what to do. You have to persuade and convince. Both upward to your bosses and across to engineering, marketing, user experience, finance, QA, customer support, ops, everyone. You've got to get them to buy them into taking the product in the direction it needs to go. You have to be the buffer. You've got to shield your team from all the "churn" and "swirl" and indecision coming down from the execs, whilst shielding the execs from the day-to-day chaos, the bug firehose, and software design debates that are always part of major development projects.

And yea, you're seen as much more expendable than the engineers since you're not writing the actual code, so you have to play a little politics (the better the company, the less of that game you have to play). When a bad idea comes down from up top, you have to push back. You can't put all the CEO's product ideas on the fast track, as tempting as it is. Ever since that goddamned Steve Jobs book came out, every senior exec in the Valley thinks they're some kind of product visionary. You've got to have the judgment to marginalize and stall the bad ideas and go all-in on the good ideas--work with engineering to make them awesome.

But once in a while, something's gonna get rammed into the product over your objection, and it's going to suck. You just have to deal with it. Make sure when it's released it "sucks less". Make sure there are analytics all over it so in a few weeks/months you can point to hard numbers showing how much it sucks, and hopefully the product can pivot away from it.

[USNetizen]

I agree with you that PMs have to use charisma and influence to get things done, but I completely and utterly disagree that they are more "expendable." A good, certified, educated and experienced PM is worth a dozen engineers. You can find engineering talent almost anywhere - but good managers are a diamond in the rough.

I've been a PM for about a half decade now, and was previously a software engineer for some big name companies. I'm telling you, PMs, if they know what they are doing and are educated properly, are worth their weight in gold - because writing code can be outsourced, management can't.

Maybe it's different in Silicon Valley (which would explain a lot of the risk-taking, lax attitudes and failure rates of startups), but the rest of the country is the opposite of what you describe as the "expendable" PM.

[lobotryas]

Wow, it's so refreshing for me to read your post, thank you!

Unfortunately in my experience (on both ENG and QA sides), PMs only serve to try and fuck you over or overload your "plate" in one of dozens delicious ways. I'm desperately trying to avoid having my experience color the rest of my perceptions (and interactions) with PM, but it's a losing battle. It's becoming all the more easier to just say "fuck PMs" and be done with it :(