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JonChesterfield

Also welcome, what companies have broadly adequate dev culture?

Something like:

- you don't get paged when things break

- it's possible to ship to production within, say, a month

- there's a sane CI system in place

- there's no product owner between you and the customer

- at least partially remote working is OK

(@op perhaps you could clarify what would qualify as amazing culture? I suspect the bar is higher than the above)

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You don’t want a product owner between you and the customer? You want to work with customers directly? Customers are exhausting!

Thought that one would be contentious. In a past life I had a product owner whose hallucinations drove development direction. I have zero faith he represented what customers wanted accurately, not least because as far as I can tell he never spoke to them either. That was not a good time.

That sounds like a bad product owner, not that product owners are bad. In every discipline there are people who are bad at their job and bring negative value.

I worked at a place with no product owner and I would literally have to task switch from writing code to talking to an irate customer on the phone because we only had basic tier 1 support. I would also have to fly out to the customer’s actual site to live debug while they stood over me mad. I’d have to also gather requirements and ideas from them. All while also needing to do a full-time software engineering job.

I would have killed for a Product Owner to shield me from that!

I am totally with you on product hallucinations being a big problem. For me the sweet spot is a product manager who grounds needs in user research that is then shared with the team, so we could get a real sense of who we were building for and why what we did mattered. And who then follows up after we put something out there to see if it's really working for the users, so that we can iterate until it's right.

It is a big jump to go from saying you don't want a bad product owner to saying you don't want a product owner at all. If you have a customer facing product, being a good product owner should be a full time job. You can't do that and be an engineer at the same time.

I would say that you don't want a bad product owner between you and the customer. Having a great one can build an amazing experience for both the customer and the devs. But you are correct that a bad one will traumatize you.

Well--well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?

What would you say... ya do here?

Can the "product owner" actually program? Otherwise it won't work.

That's not at all my experience, the best PO I had were not technical at all, but laser focused on the users. They do need to be reasonably smart, and trust your technical expertise, however

They also need to be able to avoid making promises to customers and avoid falling into the trap of "This sounds easy and fast why are you telling me it's hard and time consuming"

I think it depends, a product owner needs to inject subject matter expertise. It can be that they know how to program, but it also could be that they deeply understand customers.

In digital health setting I’ve met a few drs-turn-pms who were excellent because they could translate between what drs wanted and what engineering was thinking in a way that swe-turn-pm would struggle. Of course, the best dr pm I know also learned how to program in python because he enjoyed it (and he even shipped some small self-contained projects!).

The least effective pm I met was a non-dr non-swe who didn’t have deep understanding of either side and essentially tried to apply general pm-principles-from-a-book. But even they were positive value after a quarter of finding their place.

I don't think the PO needs to program, it might help, but its not a necessity.

they do need to know the product inside out, and who the customers are, and why the product evolved like it did. They need to be able to advocate for the customer.

This covers the majority of the tech teams at Amazon. Full CI/CD is mandated for most organizations, and pager events are tracked at the VP level. So far, few teams have enforced Return to Office. The one area which is debatable is the time to ship to production, while most changes can hit production in less than a day - work is heavily planned in advance, the ship can turn slowly.

Biased, but shortwave.com has all of these things.

- we have an event based architecture based on per customer queues, I haven't been paged in months mostly because single customer issues don't cause pages (just tickets which are handled during working hours)

- I regularly ship to prod multiple times a day. I just finished a complete overhaul of our search in about a month.

- Our CI is pretty good for a startup, certainly has the most room for improvement on this list

- as a startup you get to directly talk to customers as much as you want

- I'm fully remote, but we have regular company offsites together

- regularly do lunch and learns to share knowledge

Well, I know that 'amazing culture' can mean different things to different people. I'm interested in examples of the companies that are setting the current trends how development should be done. Structure of teams, CI/CD, pipelines, responsibilities, tooling, day-to-day working methodology (product management probably too).

Of course this judgement is subjective - I'm fine with that.

Just to understand better: who are product owners at big(ger) companies? Even PMs rarely talk to customers. PMM? Research? Not sure what size companies have engineers talk directly to customers.

If you’re managing the relationship with the customer you will also be expected to work with leadership. Lots of meetings and roadmap discussions.

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