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Comment by sfteus | Hacker News Reader

Definitely sounds like a bad PM experience, especially with the repeated insistence about handing control of the company over to the PM.

Maybe I just have good experiences with PMs? At my company they're there to figure out what customers want and what the product should deliver, and then with our EMs to balance that with what's technically feasible and what we have capacity to implement. If an EM says "there's no way we can do that on this timeline" the PM works out some alternative plan for the product.

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Yeah the "handing control of the company over" thing struck me as odd as well. I haven't ever seen that particular problem.

In the good cases I've seen, it's just as you describe, with EMs and PMs working together with high trust to get to a decent level of consensus between them, and then parlaying that consensus into leadership buy in for their roadmap.

In the bad cases, there is some breakdown in trust between the EM, PM, or leadership. Or, worse, between the EM and their team.

But I haven't run into this thing where the PM reigns supreme, above the leadership team.

Handing the company over to PMs is a very common problem I’ve seen at smaller startups.

It’s generally not that they are above the leadership team, but that that the leadership team have abdicated responsibility for product development to the head of product.

Interesting. I'll take your word for it. I'm glad I haven't seen that.

My company is product led. That means PMs have huge influence on what gets built. The how is still left to the engineers.

I think it works pretty well. We ship a lot of great stuff.

I think what I described is system where PMs have huge influence on what gets built. But also a system where engineering and strategic leadership also do. Personally that seems like the the balance to me. I think all three things - tactical product decisions, execution decisions, and strategic decisions - are important and separate.

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