Cranky Project Management…

We were managing many new products in the pipeline, evangelizing them within our customer base, the market, and with engineering. Our customers, sales team, and even engineering was excited to see us break out some fresh products because our software company had a long track record of versionitis — content on releasing one version after another with little innovation.

Almost two years later, the company continues to release incremental versions, even choosing to upgrade both versions of two competing products that were never consolidated after a merger four years ago. The company is hanging on via maintenance revenue, while most of the good people have left (or been laid off), and the parent company lost its window to flip the company profitably.

My point is that getting rid of hard-charging product managers is the death knell for any strategic hope. Coveting back room maintenance engineers is a recipe for status quo infinitum. To keep (and attract) engineering rockstars, you need top-notch, visionary executive management and the product management team to translate the vision into a solid, actionable product plan. Without PM, the vision won’t fly.

The right type of product manager may take take a year or two to get seasoned — learn the market, the company, and the products, figure out what’s needed, and get the right plan together. But once that PM is committed, if they’re good, they will be invaluable and indispensable. Are all PM’s great? Heck no, and the bad ones weigh the company down and should get the axe if they’re not contributing. But a good one is golden and will be highly specialized and attuned to the needs of the market and the company.

Interestingly and somewhat ironically, an experienced engineering manager should spend a good deal of time hedging his/her bets that any engineer could leave on any given day. Thus, the manager must ensure that cross-training happens and that any departures (both voluntary and involuntary) won’t leave a gaping hole in production and release commitments. So by design, engineers should be much more replaceable than PMs. Likewise, a decent engineer should be ready and able to go from coding office applications to coding web commerce back-ends pretty quickly so that any shifts or downturns in demand make her/him fairly recession-proof.

Wait a second, you mean my arguement has to be *strong* to post here?!? I agree with your comments and you are right, engineering is also a burden. But engineering generates code (or hardware or both) and that’s what the company sells. PM generates nothing saleable the absense of PM does not guarantee failure, thus it becomes vulnerable. The PM function can be absorbed into engineering under certain circumstances for short periods of time. I’ve seen it happen first hand. Moreover, I can think of a couple of large-ish companies that still do not have a PM function. It isn’t pretty for reasons that are supported with just about everything you blog, but it is possible. My only point, albeit flimsy, is that when balance sheets go bad, CEOs and CFOs tend not to see the world through PM-colored glasses. Kind of like pulling the doors, hood and trunk off a car to improve gas mileage. It still gets from a to b for a while.

And you could argue that both _do_ contribute because, after all, you need a product to sell to make money, but it would seem that BOTH PM and Engineering are needed for that, lest you build the wrong product which would then contribute nothing to revenue and be a big drain on profitability.

FWIW – R&D didn’t get hit at all. Doc is part of R&D. Both offshore. Neither Finance, HR, nor IT though HR & IT are both bare bones. They just hired a new CFO a month ago.