Good vs. Bad PMs, Data Scientists, TPMs, UXRs: An Engineer's view
When I did the Q&A with Meta employees on Blind a few weeks back, one bucket of questions I got was how engineers perceive cross-functional partners (XFN) such as Product Managers (PM), Technical Program Managers (TPM), Data Scientists (DS), and Data Engineers (DEs). To answer these questions, I reminisced the times that these functions added value from my and my engineering team’s perspective.
Why are these questions important? After all, there’s so much opinion on LinkedIn from PMs about how to be a great PM, DEs about how to be a great DE, and so on. Plus, performance reviews in companies are invariably conducted within each function (PMs review other PM peers, and so on). So why bother with the engineer’s opinion?
Because there are many software companies (e.g. Google, Facebook) that are engineering-centric at their core, while the other job functions are focused on making the building process more efficient, effective, etc. This is not my opinion,…