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Basically most of the article revolves around the question of who's responsibility things are and who's authority it is to make decisions to what extent. Feature creep, overstretched budgets, technical debt etc. are all direct results of the competency of these people and the authority at which people are allowed to say no.

One thing that the article glosses over is that this is much easier to do when the PM has a deep engineering understanding, and the EM has product understanding. But ultimately there are a lot of conflict potentials with the proposals in the article, specifically because the authorities don't seem to be clear.

Though there may be internal segment details that we don't know about from the article that may alleviate these issues. E.g. hiring practices or other things.



> PM has a deep engineering understanding

Amen. I've worked at a startup where the barrier to entry for a PM role was either low (in my perception) or they were allowed to get better at their job as the project progressed. Features were conjured up only to be canned after it was baked into the product and higher-ups shot things down.

The codebase was a total mess.

On the flip side, I've found experienced QA folks wanting to move up the corporate hierarchy by upskilling into PM roles a pleasure to work with, especially when it came to setting expectations upstream and estimating timelines.


The harsh truth: there's too much in this position to be handled by a single person.

Ideally, you'd want a single person with a great tech background, solid product understanding and all the additional soft skills in between.

These people, should they exist, are too few for a whole industry.

I liked the article exactly because it found the sweet spot with joint accountability and separate ownership.

Both will learn along the way a little bit of the skills of the other while partnering.


> These people, should they exist, are too few for a whole industry.

I believe these people are called purple unicorns.....




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