[CoffeeDregs]

    >The problem is that a lot of companies are structured so that this
    >is impossible for their PMs to accomplish.

Would love to hear more about this since I'm going to be structuring the engineering, and possibly product, teams for the startup I joined...

    >get buy-in from both sales and development

Totally. People often rant about Sales or Marketing or Engineering, but none exists without the other. I think the combination of deep technical skills and a two year tour of duty in Sales (as a Field Applications Engineer) provided me with the ability to pre-understand each sides' concerns and to communicate with each more effectively.

    >If leadership feels the need to put product management under sales
    >or under development, chances are they need to hire new PMs.

Yeah, I've seen this first hand two separate times and the constant refrain from the rest of the company was "why isn't engineering building what our customer's need?" I do wonder if it's possible. Or advisable. Might be something that goes bad no matter how well it starts.

[rrrx3]

Product Management is its own thing. It doesn't really belong under either of those. Keeping in mind that org charts influence thinking - rightly or wrongly - you'd be putting Product Management in a no-win situation when they're meant to act as intermediaries between engineering and sales.

I'm just joined a startup where Product is its own arm. We sync with Sales and Engineering, but we push products based on smart decisions. It wasn't always that way, from what I hear, and it was a slog to get there, but so far from what I've experienced, it's been well worth it. There's still some work to do, but it's vastly different from orgs I've been in before, where Product fell under something else and had little clout to do what needed to be done.