The product manager role has been gaining popularity in the tech industry over the recent years. As more companies add PMs to their organisation charts, there is still a lot of experimentation with team setups to find the best alignment possible between product and engineering. These two functions work now as close as they ever did, and while it is said to be the recipe for high achieving teams, lots of companies are still struggling to achieve good levels of collaboration. Strategies to make it work are well covered in Martin Fowler’s website, in this article I’ll focus on more on the engineer’s perspective and what are our expectations for a good product manager. What Not to Expect As an engineer myself I have observed friction coming from both sides, but also some productive partnerships, and while one can argue that the team or the organisation can influence the outcome, it mostly depends on how much each function is willing to collaborate with the other. Let’s do an exercise and think about these expectations in reverse. I believe the PM role is still early days, and because of that, it assumes different shapes, especially in less mature companies that are starting to build their product development strategies. If you work in the tech industry right now, you might be familiar with some of the following stereotypes. Excel Manager An ace with macros and a master at reporting progress in the weekly steering. The whole project looks like a geometric piece of art with bars stacked over each other, horizontally aligned with a column of red cells that turn green once you type in the word “Delivered”.

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