Where I work there's lately been so much additional process, planning, keeping stakeholders and dependencies up to date, etc.
Yet, the product manager position isn't really staffed, and neither is the project manager one. So, all the additional work beyond design and coding also falls on the owning engineer. And since we are frugal that engineer is happy to get maybe 1 additional engineer assigned to help. But often that one will also have their own project they own or need to prepare for owning.
So the lead/owning engineers turn into mostly product and project managers but are still expected to do the down to earth construction of the product which means to get anything done in the expected time frame engineers need to put in long hours.
I just don't get it. It seems utterly wasteful use of resources. I'm not saying engineers cannot be good at these things, but generally speaking product and project managers cannot and do not need to be able to code in addition to owning a project/product. Adding/hiring more project managers to projects would be the single most effective way to speed up project timelines as it frees the engineers, the producers of tangible product deliverables to focus on that.
In no way do I mean engineers should be cloistered away from dealing with product or project decisions or even chatting with users. But it needs to be in the correct proportion to the actual engineering work.
Add to that the addition of duplicate processes (e.g. we are dealing with 3 right now that cover the same ground but are ever slightly different in what needs to be done to cause triple effort) and everything grinds to a halt. A project manager could also be the right person to push back on management and dedicate resources to improving project management overall.
> Where I work there's lately been so much additional process, planning, keeping stakeholders and dependencies up to date, etc.
This is why I like the way the linked article put it: you can lose most PMs without sacrificing efficiency. I would imagine a great deal of this stuff isn't actually important and only hampers the team's velocity. A PM will make it their job to make sure it gets done, if there is no PM the unimportant stuff will fall by the wayside.
> A PM will make it their job to make sure it gets done, if there is no PM the unimportant stuff will fall by the wayside.
You will always need to spend some time project managing your project even when things are not as process heavy.
You still need to make sure that timelines are met or flag if they are not. Keep dependencies informed, push/remind other teams you depend on to fix a bug, add the feature they promised. Communicate with management to get more resources, etc.
A PM can do all of those things with a bit of input once in a while from engineers.
These things only aren't important if you neither have timelines to meet, have no dependencies, and aren't accountable for the success of your project. Outside a hobby project outside work I'm not sure we ever have that luxury.
The article doesn't talk about other roles, so maybe where OP worked these things would have been assisted by other roles, e.g. the product manager.
Maybe from that perspective it's not clear to the engineer what value project managers provide but I feel it's a bit of a limited perspective to say a role that can dedicate their time to tasks of type X isn't of benefit to those who'd otherwise need to do these tasks.
I mean would you say the same about customer support? About getting clarity on compliance/legal/finance (via asking external council)? About internal developer tooling? There's a point where an engineer working on a product may need to do all these things in addition to the building. But you cannot claim that it'd make no difference to the engineer's efficiency if they could delegate those things to others.
Where I work there's lately been so much additional process, planning, keeping stakeholders and dependencies up to date, etc.
Yet, the product manager position isn't really staffed, and neither is the project manager one. So, all the additional work beyond design and coding also falls on the owning engineer. And since we are frugal that engineer is happy to get maybe 1 additional engineer assigned to help. But often that one will also have their own project they own or need to prepare for owning.
So the lead/owning engineers turn into mostly product and project managers but are still expected to do the down to earth construction of the product which means to get anything done in the expected time frame engineers need to put in long hours.
I just don't get it. It seems utterly wasteful use of resources. I'm not saying engineers cannot be good at these things, but generally speaking product and project managers cannot and do not need to be able to code in addition to owning a project/product. Adding/hiring more project managers to projects would be the single most effective way to speed up project timelines as it frees the engineers, the producers of tangible product deliverables to focus on that.
In no way do I mean engineers should be cloistered away from dealing with product or project decisions or even chatting with users. But it needs to be in the correct proportion to the actual engineering work.
Add to that the addition of duplicate processes (e.g. we are dealing with 3 right now that cover the same ground but are ever slightly different in what needs to be done to cause triple effort) and everything grinds to a halt. A project manager could also be the right person to push back on management and dedicate resources to improving project management overall.