Amol Avasare: commitment

Transcript context

…Maybe craft an amazing cold email to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Feel free to craft that email. So that's one, is I think we are going to be hiring in a number of PMs. But then the second thing that we do is we very much hire product-minded engineers. I think this has always been the best thing to do in growth. You always want to have the engineers coming up with ideas, et cetera, especially people who can really step in as mini PMs if the PM is absent. And so we're basically more formally leveraging that right now because we are so stretched. So, the frame that we have is that if a project is two weeks of engineering time or less, then the engineer is on the hook to effectively be the PM for that. And so that means things like talking to security, talking to legal, talking to cross-functional stakeholders, and the engineer is very much driving that. The PM will get looped in and they'll advise if needed. And if something's wildly going off track, then they'll step in, but they're much more in an advisory capacity versus execution. If a project is more than two engineering weeks, then the default is that the PM should continue to be on the hook for making that go well. They'll still delegate more to eng, but they're squarely accountable. It's not fully clean-cut. It's like, use your head. If this is a one-week thing, but it's extremely controversial, the PM should probably still drive it. But that, I think is the approach that I expect more companies will start to do, which is just deputize the engineers to be mini PMs. Now, not everyone can do it. So the PMs, the engineers who are more product-minded, suddenly their value goes up significantly in order of magnitude. And then I think we will probably still be hiring a lot of PMs. There is so much interesting stuff I want to follow up on here. Okay, so one is this idea of two weeks, just briefly. I always joke as a PM, you can go on vacation and be away for a couple of weeks from your team and things are going to be all right. There's a momentum, there's a plan, people keep operating, and it feels like that's kind of this rule of thumb you use of just, "Okay, if it's a two-week project, you'll be all right without a PM. You can handle it." I love that those two connect. Okay. The other here is so interesting. So you're saying here that because engineers are so accelerated, and this all makes sense, PMs and design are kind of just like, "Holy." It feels like hard to keep up with this pace of engineering. And what you're saying is you need more and more PMs to keep up. That's one route, or it's engineers that can PM essentially, which is so funny. It's just like, okay, great news for the product managers until more of the PMey stuff can be done by AI. But that's a really interesting trend. I don't know, is there anything else there just like, "Oh wow, we actually may need more PMs"? The ratio of more PMs, fewer engineers might be the future.…

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