hey platform product managers, in your org, are you acting as technical lead of your internal developer platform product team too or are there dedicated technical leaders that are taking this role? if so, how does your relationship with them look like?

So I've had to do that role of joint technical lead and product manager, and it sucked and I would advise anyone not to do it

They are completely different skill sets with different priorities and when I attempted both I just did both badly

Reminds me of: Engineering Leadership Skill Set Overlaps. 😄

That's really what you need for a platform -- a PM that has a technical background. A good PM can get into their user's shoes -- it's one thing to do that for a B2B product, it's another to do it for a technical product

Yeah, my experience is that unless you have someone dedicated to do PM work, you’ll never get the time. A lot of what a PM does doesn’t look like “work” for an engineer. You might get an hour or two here or there to chat with users, do some data crunching etc. But I think it’s quite powerful if the organisation really puts a stake in the ground and says that they’re going to do platform as a product, and really invest in that. That said, it’s interesting to think about how that PM is supported, as they’ll be flying solo most likely. It’s then probably best if you can get an experienced PM, but that’s also going to be challenging 😄

Thanks for your inputs, it is interesting because in general the PM role is different depending on the organization. I agree, platform PMs must be technical. But the moment that this role is required to cover also for the technical leadership of the engineering team is where it gets odd to me.

@Erick Aguayo, you received quite a lot of responses on why it's better to hold PM and technical leader duties by separate people - I fully support these arguments and it is also how it works in my team, I am a PM for Platform closely collaborating with Technical leader and ... UX designer. These three of us form a so-called Product Trio, very nicely explained by Teresa Torres here a great product practitioner and thinker. While we are not that advanced in how she describes it I am sure this is the direction to follow for any product teams including those building IDPs. A couple of principles that I found most valuable based on day-to-day work experience: 1. Collocation, in the office. This is the foundation for building relationships because by design you spend much more time together, which means you talk. You go for lunch together, spark some random discussions any time anything pops into your mind, and synthesize different inputs from different perspectives to new knowledge. This is a true game-changer. 2. PM, UX, tech lead and other software engineers form one common Product Team. There's no PM and the team. Everybody is part of the same team which means they attend the same standups (daily Scrum), planning sessions, demos, retrospectives, backlog refinements 3. Start with the problem. Before solving with the team make sure you explain users' needs to the team. This is the only way to enable innovation - solving old problems in new ways, with new possibilities. 4. Design solutions as a team. Everyone brings a valuable perspective that is crucial in building the right solution.

hey @Grzegorz Wojciechowski I was on a long pto, so could not see your response 🙂 Thanks for sharing, I am familiar with Teresa framing and I love it, I’ve seem it work for many products. In my case I also work with a Tech Lead, no UX designer. Precisely because I interact with engineers every day and I am technical, I just want to make sure that I mark the line there and set the right expectations for all roles.