What should be my expectation from Product Manager
As a developer, I'm finding it challenging to work with our product manager hired 6 months ago due to their technical knowledge gap. They rely on us to explain the feasibility of executing business requirement more than usual and loop us in for every small meeting.
There has been negligible attempt on their part to understand the technical architecture of our services. They set up 1 hour meetings just to get updates from every team member.
My frustration is coming due to a previous experience of working with an amazing product manager. Are my expectations wrong?
Discussion
(2 comments)- 1
5 days agoSoftware Engineer @ AmazonProduct team should own, wait for it..., the product. You being in every small meeting shows a gap in the product manager's ownership. Your expectations are not wrong. Some products are complex and its just that they might need a little more time to get acquainted with your business.
There is a fine line between you being a consultant for them (obviously outside your role's responsibility) and doing the business evaluation work for them. Try to stick to the former as much as you can.This is also a great opportunity for you to emerge as a trusted leader. Understand the product manager's working model, setup a workflow within your team, update your trackers, write clear docs, requirements for your existing product and at some point - hand it over to the product manager and let them know that they are the qualified expert to handle it.
Also, feel free to decline meetings if there are alternative means to provide updates. - 0
8 days agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroThis is a classic scenario when it comes to PMs (i.e. needing to "translate" technical material to non-technical) - I hope this helps: "How to converse with a non technical PM?"
However, there's a broader problem here where they seem to be a micro-manager. On your end (and that of every other engineer on the team), I recommend doing all you can to build in public. However, if it's a still a problem, you need to deliver feedback somehow, either to them directly or your manager (probably this one). An effective 1-hour daily standup every day is such a huge waste of engineering effort.
What should be my expectation from Product Manager
Answering your top-level question, a good PM should operate at a high-level, defining broad strokes vision and trusting engineers with the nuts-and-bolts implementation. I would say at most a weekly sync with them should be needed unless your team is in crisis.
Other Great Discussions
![Mid-Level Software Engineer [SDE 2] at Amazon company logo](/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffirebasestorage.googleapis.com%2Fv0%2Fb%2Ftech-career-growth.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fcompany_logos%252Famazon_logo.jpg%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3Dff5f2302-08be-43bc-b7b1-d381ba508d99&w=96&q=75){kind=logo}
