it's obviously better for the engineer to demo their own product
Again.. rarely does an engineer create a product in a vacuum. Usually a few disciplines contribute to the project, and a manager can be absolutely instrumental.
And of the various creators of a product should be candidates to demo a thing. The right person certainly depends on the nature of the product, the team dynamics, the audience of the demo, etc.
I for one wouldn't want to work somewhere with some kind of rigid "engineer X owns product Y, manager Z is just a manager" kind of culture.
> Again.. rarely does an engineer create a product in a vacuum.
That may be rare, but that’s what people on our team did... multiple times. For my own part, for each of several products, I wrote the project charter, interviewed potential users and stakeholders, created UI comps, built the app (database, server side, front-end), managed the server VMs and infrastructure, negotiated and built 3rd party integrations (when necessary), wrote the documentation, gave the demos, supported users, and released updates for years afterwards based on feedback.
It wasn’t a culture thing as much as a necessity. We were a team of 10 with 3-5 projects in development at all times, and nearly 30 in maintenance/support after several years. And that on top of normal QA activities.
In retrospect, I think Margaret intentionally had us handling such breadth individually in order to set us up for success as much as possible (several of us she had hired straight out of college). I didn’t realize it at the time, but the QA team didn’t have to do all that stuff to begin with. The demand for it only began to really increase after we had released several projects that had a significant positive impact on the department.
Again.. rarely does an engineer create a product in a vacuum. Usually a few disciplines contribute to the project, and a manager can be absolutely instrumental.
And of the various creators of a product should be candidates to demo a thing. The right person certainly depends on the nature of the product, the team dynamics, the audience of the demo, etc.
I for one wouldn't want to work somewhere with some kind of rigid "engineer X owns product Y, manager Z is just a manager" kind of culture.