Hacker News Reader

Comment by websap | Hacker News Reader

"Your engineers" => Engineers aren't "yours". As an engineer I've never reported to product and don't ever plan to.

Engineering requires hours of careful deliberation between choices when building large and complex systems. Product managers are incentivized to deliver features faster. If you're a PM who actually understands engineering, try to understand the actual operational burden your engineers are facing.

View on HN

For whatever reason I read it as sort of affectionate rather than really expressing "ownership." I would have been perfectly happy to be one of this person's engineers.

>> Product managers are incentivized to deliver features faster. This is a misconception. Product managers are/should be (depending on your organization) incentivized to maximize value. Sometimes it may mean being faster to market to validate a hypothesis, other times it may mean pausing on launches for a month or two to make sure you've built a strong enough foundation to set up for the future. Often, it means balancing of your team's portfolio to take on "execution wins", invest in tech for the future, and explore some big bets.

Agree 100% that every PM needs to understand the operational burden the engineering team is facing as well as other blockers in their way, and proactively ensure that they focus on the work with utmost clarity and without unnecessary interruptions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com