Comment by m463
3 days ago
All the negative responses.
I have been at countless places where the engineers are out of sync with the product.
And it might be something silly like their coworker added something they didn't know about and the UI is now confusing. Could even be the website started proclaiming something that didn't align well with the product.
Another factor is that the [product -> PM -> bug system -> engineer -> fix -> QA -> product] loop is heavy. It takes a long time and major things get fixed but minor friction doesn't.
having [product <-> engineer] can be amazing.
Engineers might have never encountered the full experience, or may merely be out of sync with how it works today vs last year.
> I have been at countless places where the engineers are out of sync with the product.
Me too, but surprisingly it happens more often at places with the most Product Managers.
My worst experience was at a company that tried to enforce a specific ratio of Product Managers and "Product Designers" to engineers. If you added up the designers, product, project, and program people the total was higher than the number of engineers.
It only made everything worse. Fighting your way through the Product Management bureaucracy while trying to avoid having one of the PMs view your input as a threat was a job in itself.
Great Product Managers are invaluable additions to a company. The modern version of Product Management has attracted a lot of people who thrive on bureaucracy and process. The proliferation of Product Management influencers has made it much worse.
100%, my current team could benefit from a strong technical PM, but the risk of negative impact from a poor PM - and the 10:1 ratio you see of bad-to-good PMs in the wild - has me pushing back against hiring one. The risk isn't worth the reward.
you're not wrong, but i don't think forcing engineers to take sales calls is the right move either. there's lots of soft skills involved in running a successful call that engineers aren't trained or even interviewed on.
(i'm definining "sales calls" as the initial discovery call before a demo or proof of concept is agreed upon. i would be okay with having engineers _ride along_ for complex presales demos, but even then, product should really be serving that role.)
There are myriad of ways to get this wrong and I have seen them all happen:
- force all the communications with the users through Project Managers or Product Owners. Sometimes they are great and sometimes they are terrible.
- The customers refuse to talk to the developers and so they are forced to interpret the users managers requirements without any further input.
- The developers just want to write code and refuse to meet the customer forcing all communication through their product manager or bug tracker.
- I have seen a couple of times where commercial software platforms were used the technology can get in the way, they are limited in the types of modifications and customisations that can be applied and this can make some workflows really awful.
There is always a disconnect somewhere, someone blocking a conversation happening and it can be the customer, a middle man or the developers causing it, often its all three to get a really dysfunctional system or the solution has been chosen before any developers or users really got into the details and its the wrong choice.
There are a lot of ways to make systems that aren't very good for the users.
Yeah I think having engineers understand product is important as I think it's the harder to get right than the basic engineering. Most of the products I've worked on have failed for product reasons so just from a logical standpoint it makes sense to focus on making sure that's a strength for a team.