Engineering Manager vs. Product Manager: What's the Difference? | Hacker News Reader

Engineering Manager vs. Product Manager: What's the Difference?

blog.get-merit.com

21 pointsgmays15 comments

At the end of the day, I find that there are only ever two problems:

* Building the right thing

* Building the thing right

At every company, one of these two questions will be harder than the other and that has a big determination on the relative power/impact of the PM/EM. You have companies like Github for example where the early days customer empathy came almost for free so it was a very EM driven culture. And you have very emotionally designed products like Instagram where PM pre-eminence came from the top.

Every PM/EM relationship is divvying these two tasks with a bias of BTRT going to the PM and BTTR going to the EM but it's never a clean dividing line between the two.

In general, just do what makes sense for the team and know each other's strengths and weaknesses and especially where there are areas of mutual weakness as an area to be careful and invest more effort in.

> The product manager vs. engineering manager dynamic comes down to who owns which aspects of developing a product. At the highest level, the product manager is responsible for the “what” and “why”: “What is the product we’re building, and why are we building it?”

> The engineering manager is responsible for “how” and “who”: “How will we build this product, and who will build it?”

I have hope for the rest of the article, in that they got this part right.

Coming up next on a content-farm near you, “Engineering Technician vs Technical Engineer: What’s the difference?”

This is a good article. As someone who has now done both for a long enough time to know the roles well, nearly all of this rings true to me.

As an engineer, I almost never had time to pay attention to high-level business needs, because I was too deep in the weeds of a specific problem. I hated meetings and bureaucracy.

As a startup founder, I was torn between the need to pay attention to high-level business needs, and suffered when I spent too much time in the code, but there wasn't a choice.

As a PM, I regret not being able to spend time on engineering details, because I spend most of my time working on higher-level issues.

That said, if I could wave a wand and make one change to the current industry, it would be to make 100% of PMs have deep knowledge of engineering. I have no idea how you do the job well without this experience, other than living in a constant state of fear. Too many PMs are bad engineers or worse, non-engineers. This is a recipe for an ineffective PM.

it takes someone special to go from engineer to product/project manager though. Good engineers turn into terrible PMs more times than not.

Yes, it's definitely a wand-waving thing, though I have to ask whether or not it's worse to have a PM with little eng experience, or an engineer with no...PM skills?

I submit that the former is worse based on prior experience, but it's just a hunch, and possibly a bias on my part.

The source of conflict I have seen most is when one person thinks they can do what someone else does better, often without reflecting that if this were true, they would already be doing it.

The other thing is that engineering managers are often former engineers who mostly operate in the concrete, with closed loops, transactions, and controls, metrics, and outcomes, where product managers are typically former sales eng, architects, consultants, and others who deal in managing open loop dynamics, alignment, positioning, risk, power, signalling, impressions, and desire.

These are really different foundations of experience and even worldviews. One can do the other to a point, but I haven't seen generalists outperform specialists in either domain.

i didn't see it in the article but in my experience an engineering manager covers multiple products where a product manager is dedicated to a single product.

I've found that this convention can depend on the organization. I've managed multiple products as a PM, and in some cases people who do this will be called "Product Line Managers". I've also worked for companies that (for sufficiently complex products) have PMs for a particular capability/subsystem of a product, with another PM managing the product as a whole.

This always seems weird to me, engineers should be product managers.

I’ve worked on teams where this isn’t the case and it generally results in a shittier product, and teams which this was the case resulted in success.

At the end of the day these are all arbitrary distinctions, which ultimately leads to silos, turf-wars and 'definition-nazis'

cynical take. you need to define who owns what, otherwise you have people who assume and have expectations without communication which leads to even bigger issues and resentment. it's not unlike a romantic relationship

I prefer ownership at a Task/Artifact level.

A Role-level definition severely limits one's ability to grow, get holistic/big picture view and leading to "That's not my job" mentality, all because someone arbitrarily put a line, not dissimilar to culture or standard of living differences between arbitrary political lines.

sure, at that point its semantics. but clear expectations and ownership of tasks/granular aspects of your jobs helps everyone be happier

there isn't one; both are getting laid off.

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