I think the software industry needs to rethink the “common wisdom” that engineering doesn’t have a business focus. I believe a good number of PM’s (often the best ones) come out of engineering.

I believe the part of this discussion that is missing is – what stage is the company? If it’s an early stage startup, you definitely need the founder as the PM(loosely defined) until you do some form of customer discovery/validation regardless of what dept. they are in. In this scenario your investment in engineering is critical and as such they shouldn’t report to product management. I believe market risk is greater than technology risk at this point, but you can still fail if you don’t get the details right. That’s not a different message than what you are saying – hire good people and empower them and you’ll probably get good results regardless of structure. The fact that our experience is almost entirely opposite is probably due to a limited set of experiences.

In an established company, the dynamics are different. You probably couldn’t get to be big without doing the tough engineering work, so maybe having PM as market focused “feature list gatherers” is fine.

Thanks for the comment. I agree with your last paragraph wholeheartedly. I don’t agree with your second sentence though that PM should report to Engineering if there is a hierarchy. Becoming subservient to Engineering would remove the business focus and eliminate much of the value of PM. Product Management would morph into Project Management and that’s a route to failure.

But back to your last paragraph. In many companies, there isn’t a balance in the relationship and that is the root cause of many dysfunctions.

The question was a hypothetical one meant to induce discussion; which it certainly did.

If everyone were reasonable, we wouldn’t see many of these issues in companies. But the issue comes down to one of company culture. Where a Product Management centric culture was instituted by the CEO and supported by Sr. Management, I’ve seen success more often than not. Where the culture was technology centric, I’ve seen failure more often than not.

I’ve even seen this within companies where specific eng teams thought they knew best & focused on technology — “We need to rearchitect to use Hibernate for the DB” — vs. actually worked to deliver customer value, those products failed. The issue here was that the VP of Eng supported this culture and thus allocated resources not according to what was best for the business, but what was best for his team.

Both PM and Eng deserve a peer seat at the table. The nature of the relationship is one of balance. Without that, your product and your business are at risk.

The reason I use the QB analogy is because that role cannot function on its own – it depends on others sticking to their roles – and since football is command and control, it works fine. However, the true challenge for PMs is in finessing what I refer to as negotiating horizontal contracts with people in other functions.

I also agree with you that PM should be afforded its own “function” in business.

As another data point, in most industries outside of tech, PM tends to report to Marketing. However, even when it reports to Marketing, when PM doesn’t have enough control or influence of other marketing mix elements, then you get what I call “sub-functional” silos where even the marketing people cannot get coordinated and work on their own agendas.

In tech (where I spent my PM years), I always reported to Development, except in one instance at AT&T. I worked for a woman for 3 years – she had both tech and PM reporting to her, and, she was AMAZING at leading both of these functions, and, it made my job easier in negotiating with my peers (there were 3 tech directors and me, a pm dir).

I think we’re all on the same page. What I would like to see however, are truly empowered cross-functional product teams that own the product, and are accountable together for results. We’ve seen this in companies we benchmarked (during my corporate life), and in a few of the companies I’ve worked with in my current life.

Thanks for the comment. In general I agree with you, but I do want to caution against the quarterback analogy. It focuses too much on the individual. One of the problems I see is that people don’t view Product Management as a full fledged business function, but simply a collection of individuals with narrow responsibilities.

Also, who reports to whom is not intended to imply one function is senior to the other, but simply what is the optimal organization to achieve business goals. While it may be important early on in a technology company to be technology centric, that phase quickly passes, and it’s the objectives of the business that must drive the technology focus and efforts.

This is a hard pill for many on the engineering side of the house to swallow. They have large numbers and in theory a lot of political power, but in reality unless they align optimally with business objectives, they are a major business inhibitor vs. a business driver.

Product Management needs to be staffed and structured for success. Most of the time, unfortunately, it is not. This is one of the root problems for PM/Eng dysfunction, and a problem that will take a lot of effort and eduction within the technology industry to properly address.