> They shield you from product owners and stakeholders by meeting with them and giving you only the information you need
I've worked at a lot of places like this, and I'm continually surprised people enjoy it. For me, it always ends up having the telephone game problem. You spend a huge amount of time error-correcting.
How do folks scale it? Given the aforementioned error-correction process, the amount of time a manager spends facilitating that process caps with very few engineers.
We have gone another way and our engineering teams work with product managers and together they make decisions. The PM deals with gathering feedback from our analytics teams, end-users and clients, and summarizes that for the team.
We feel this gives a sense of ownership to individual engineers and allows them to make better decisions without a lot of back and forth communication funneled through a proxy. And it also means we don't need a dozen managers.
Good engineers are expensive and hard to find, and I'd say finding excellent managers is just as onerous.
I've worked at a lot of places like this, and I'm continually surprised people enjoy it. For me, it always ends up having the telephone game problem. You spend a huge amount of time error-correcting.
How do folks scale it? Given the aforementioned error-correction process, the amount of time a manager spends facilitating that process caps with very few engineers.
We have gone another way and our engineering teams work with product managers and together they make decisions. The PM deals with gathering feedback from our analytics teams, end-users and clients, and summarizes that for the team.
We feel this gives a sense of ownership to individual engineers and allows them to make better decisions without a lot of back and forth communication funneled through a proxy. And it also means we don't need a dozen managers.
Good engineers are expensive and hard to find, and I'd say finding excellent managers is just as onerous.