“There’s an IC sitting out there who just had an amazing idea for a new feature/product. What happens?”
in a company with more than 10 staff, they should talk to a product manager, sorry. you can't build a sustainable company by adding new features willy nilly whenever some dev has a Great Idea.
I don’t like the wording of the question but saying “talk to a product manager” is a red flag answer that would be the exact wrong answer an engineer would be looking for.
A good manager coaches their engineers on how to package (one pager, demo, talking to partners etc.) and present their ideas to get buy-in from leadership, these types of managers are the ones hackers like.
A bad manager is one who gives a dismissive “talk to a PM” answer, who doesn’t coach through the politics/process of the company and simply dismisses your ideas outright. If you hear this type of answer it gives the impression of those “just do your job and keep your head down” sort of workplaces with management that’s bad for growth.
> build a sustainable company by adding new features willy nilly whenever some dev has a Great Idea.
This is hilarious because it seems to place some kind of value on a stable interface, but that is something that companies / product managers have themselves systematically destroyed over the last decade or so in pretty much every arena. Only software for professionals is even slightly immune to this (IDEs/CAD/etc). Pretty much everything else has auto-updated churn that you can't opt out of, on everything from UI to core features.
Putting devs in charge of inserting features "willy nilly" would likely result in a much more consistent experience than what we usually get, because they'd be willing to declare something "finished" eventually. Product managers want the churn, because they can boost fake metrics like engagement, and it gives them stuff to do.
> Putting devs in charge of inserting features "willy nilly" would likely result in a much more consistent experience than what we usually get, because they'd be willing to declare something "finished" eventually.
I have seen both, but at my most recent role, this was entirely the opposite of the case. We built integrations between different systems (ETL-like). Before the company adopted any "product principles", our integrations were haphazard and sporadic. Engineers would only build what was needed for current customer pain or in response to support saying "this entity doesn't sync".
So what, you say? Why build things you don't need? Because then the next customer says "I need X" and you say "Well, crap, that's going to be a lot of work because of how we wrote W", and either it's a lot of work, or they do some shoehorning and overload tables (my favorite was "'Location' in ERP A and 'Cost Code' in ERP B share much of the same columns, so we can use it for both and just change the label based on which ERP is in use." Then along came ERP C, which supported 'Location' AND 'Cost Code', and threw a spanner in the works.)
I am not saying product managers are a panacea. And I will acknowledge my 'bias' here - I am a PM, after spending a decade in the devops/SRE space.
But deeply embedding PMs and Eng is the key to success, I believe. My conversations with Eng Leads and EMs are happening 'all day every day'. I don't flit in, drop a bunch of stories in the backlog for Eng to refine, and then vanish to my meetings.
My job is to paint a broader picture of not just where we are now and what's next, but the grander and longer term vision.
This way, when designing or architecting things, there can be an awareness of that, and hopefully less "painting yourself into a corner". And with that comes a conducive atmosphere where Engineers do come up with Great Ideas, AND have a lower friction pathway to getting it in, because they know we can always discuss it.
Yup. Which is why this question can give some good insight into how the company runs. Is it chaotic? Suffocatingly rigid? Or is there a pipeline to triage and introduce new features in a sustainable and beneficial way?
Yep I agree, one of my last jobs a few years ago was like that - 1 PM for every 2 engineers. The entire time was PMs fighting with each other of scarce development resources, completely toxic culture
There needs to be some cat herding and not all ideas are great but on a strong team the devs know their product very well and understand their users very well. Amazing product managers also do that but they are a very rare beast.
There's nothing wrong per se with "talk with the product manager" but is that where good ideas go to die or is that a productive/creative/innovative environment where teams build great stuff.
A ton of stuff you use every day is "software developer had great idea". Even from really large companies. (p.s. using "IC" can already be a red flag - we don't use this terminology in the large company where I work).
It's why I prefer working in startups. Less money but the amount of crippling BS you deal with is vastly less. Basically, you are the only thing on the critical path to delivering anything. A lot of what I do in startups is ruthlessly getting rid of anything that blocks me that I can't control.
I do some consultancy on the side with bigger companies that are stuck in exactly the way you describe. Because the elephant in the room is usually that product managers vary widely in quality and I've seen them be a bottleneck in quite a few places. There's this weird dynamic where you get non technical product managers act more like a CTO and CTOs act more like a VP of engineering in some companies.
Since I come in and advice at that level, I get to see this dynamic up close. Good ideas don't stand a chance in such companies and they actually end up paying me to tell them to stop doing stupid things that they already know they shouldn't be doing to begin with. A lot of companies are not long term sustainable because they fight themselves into corners like that. That's why consulting can be so lucrative. You just relay what engineers in the company are saying anyway to their managers. All you need to do is listen and talk authoritatively.
A good company would have a culture of being open to sound engineering and be empowering people to make things better. Steve Jobs famously encouraged that in his people and got rid of people that tried to prevent that. Elon Musk apparently does similar things. Neither are/were particularly pleasant people to report to but there's a pattern in their behavior that they encourage and insist on creative and critical thinking around them. A weak manager does the opposite. Weak managers are the reason consultants like me get lucrative gigs to tell them what they should already know.
Startups can also have know-it-all product management. Ask me how I know. It's possible to have the best and the worst of all worlds, i.e. get paid more and be in a fairly functional environment or get paid less and be in a less functional one. The only startup where you're more or less guaranteed not to put up with bs is your startup. I've worked in pretty nice startups as well but also in good larger companies.
in a company with more than 10 staff, they should talk to a product manager, sorry. you can't build a sustainable company by adding new features willy nilly whenever some dev has a Great Idea.