
Ask HN: The Role of Good Product Management in Job Satisfaction of Engineers? - abrax3141
I have this sense, and am looking for feedback (perhaps pointers to literature supporting or refuting) that one important thing that good product management can help accomplish is what I&#x27;ll call &quot;perceived job unity, mostly among engineers. There is an endemic problem in medium-sized engineering teams where the engineers don&#x27;t perceive the unity of what they are doing because they are in the depths of seven different complex components. My hypothesis is that leading the whole engineering organization to understand the unity of the product is not the role of engineering managers, nor of the C-level execs, but specifically of the PMs. Can anyone point me to literature&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;etc. that support or refute this hypothesis?
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allsunny
I'm not aware of any literature related to your hypothesis but it makes sense
intuitively. Self-determination theory, which seeks to identify what motivates
us as humans, has as one of its pillars, "relatedness." Engineers need to feel
like their work matters, PMs can help with that by sharing a vision and
customer feedback that drives a group of individuals forward.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-
determination_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory)

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byebyetech
The most important thing product people need to understand is to not treat
engineers as mindless robotic resource that you can deploy on any problem and
get the output of Code. Engineers are human beings so it makes sense to create
environment in which they can do their best. There are human universals like
feeling of belonging, job satisfaction, flow, low stress, less chaos,
appreciation that can improve team productivity. Wish there was a way to track
it in a quantifiable way.

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rahimnathwani
"is an endemic problem in medium-sized engineering teams where the engineers
don't perceive the unity of what they are doing because they are in the depths
of seven different complex components."

What size of team are you talking about (i.e. number of engineers)? The
situation you describe might be related to the clarity with which product
boundaries/scope is defined. In a product team of 5-10 engineers and one
product manager, it's unusual for any individual engineer to be working on
something 7 layers deep in the context of that team's product, without
understanding why.

If you treat product management as divvying up features and assigning them to
engineers from an undifferentiated pool, then the situation you describe is
very likely.

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cimmanom
Certainly, bad product management can make engineers unhappy. This includes
failure to identify important features early in the development process;
unwillingness to cut features to meet deadlines; waffling on what a feature
should do so you end up rewriting the same thing several times, which feels
like spinning your wheels; and probably several other things that come to mind
right now.

Plus, some engineers are motivated by seeing the software they build get used
and solve problems for the users - bad project management certainly makes this
less likely.

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abrax3141
Thanks, all for these extremely useful notes. To address a couple of
specifics: I’m thinking of an organization at least large enough to have PMs
with that title (per rahimnathwani). The specific in the specific case I’m
concerned with is about 30 engineers across about 10 major components (and of
course hundreds of smaller components).

In many cases of smaller startups, the CEO or another person with a different
title is probably acting PM (per hluska).

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olegious
I would read Marty Cagan's blog
[https://svpg.com/articles/](https://svpg.com/articles/) many of his posts in
the "Most Popular" section address the product manager + engineer
relationship.

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rajacombinator
Not everything needs [citation needed]. Your point is logical and obviously
true.

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hluska
Calling it obviously true is a big stretch. The comment was:

 _My hypothesis is that leading the whole engineering organization to
understand the unity of the product is not the role of engineering managers,
nor of the C-level execs, but specifically of the PMs. Can anyone point me to
literature /blogs/etc. that support or refute this hypothesis?_

Lots of companies take different approaches here. I've worked for startups
where this has come from the c-suite, lead developers or product managers. I
would like to learn more about this too.

