Surviving as a Product Manager: Lessons from a 10-Year SWE and 8-Year PM

I had to interview 10 year SWE and 8 year PM Mario Di Nucci on this hot take.

Here’s what I learned.

There are 3 primary reasons why PMs in general are on the frontline for layoffs, alongside QA and recruiting:

1. Product is typically too layered
2. It’s challenging to quantify PM’s work
3. Most PMs are middlemen

So my question was: are there any solutions?

Here’s what Mario answered: For 1 & 3 there are solutions, but they are still rare.

Check out the complete interview here (free, no paywall).

The reasons are:

For 1 — being too layered — it can be overcome:

↳ Team just have to stay disciplined with ratios.
↳ Generally, a better PM:Eng ratio is something lean like 1:10.
↳ And in terms of layering, having a product leader for every 5 or so PMs makes sense.

“Trust is the key, so you cannot control what cannot be controlled. With proper OKRs system in place, you can synch teams across the company and making sure they are all performing (or maybe not) toward the same goals.”

For 2 — hard to quantify — a clear solution doesn’t exist:

↳ A PM shares most metrics, that they own, with other functions.
↳ Engineering has tickets, Market has budgets.
↳ PMs have…?

“Folks have proposed KPIs like conversion rate or user satisfaction to measure the work of a PM. According to my personal experience, these quantities are owned by multiple teams in the company, and maybe they are measurable successfully in the middle to long run. But, for sure, they cannot give the measure of what a single PM does.”

For 3 — middle-men — it can be overcome:

↳ The problem is PMs are usually not empowered.
↳ If PMs decide the solution and can say no, then that’s ownership.
↳ But that model often breaks down as the PM tries to say no to an urgent request, but isn’t able to, which upsets engineering.

“When you are fully empowered to solely drive discovery, and choose the solution (the WHAT), PMs are not middle-men.”

In Mario’s experience, only 1 out of 10 companies he worked at actually operate that way, though.