@bcantrill @oxidecomputer @ahl @sudomateo

I'm, just working backwards though podcasts I missed. As an ex-PM... encouraging/supporting developers interacting with customers ought to be one of the most important roles of a PM.

And at an extreme of putting developers in front of customers: we had been selling VMware Workstation for Windows hosts for around a year, were getting some nice traction but an early reseller in Japan pops up with a 1k? (going to 10k??--my memory is fading) seat deal at a large Japanese power utility. But there are nasty technical problems happening, it was high visibility and folks are trying to help but between language issues, lots of old legacy software apps, maybe Japanese software issues, working though a reseller etc. things were going nowhere fast. And this was one of our largest number of seat deals until then... was this going to happen in all large deals? Were we going to fail and then demoralize our sales reps to not chase large deals? etc.

So we got together to work out what we are doing. Diane (CEO) nailed it, after listening to whole pile of "we don't really know anything" and realizing everything is a mess, she asks Paul Chan, director of engineering, "Can you go to Japan, I'm thinking for a few weeks, take several of the engineers you need to solve these problems with you. Get a hotel right by the customer. Take the source code with you so you can build locally and just fix it."

I think Paul went there with three senior developers (and no PMs 🙃). And of course they fixed the issues, and maybe more than anything else it raised an already high bar on engineering and customer support that we knew we were going to need with our server products.

@darryl_ramm @bcantrill @oxidecomputer @ahl

I agree that getting customers and engineers together is one of the most important things any company should do. Who better to facilitate that than a PM? Of course like everything it has to be done in moderation but there are a lot of benefits to getting the people who build something talking to the people who use it.

Thanks for listening to the episode!

@sudomateo @bcantrill @oxidecomputer @ahl

Yep the PM should be the one setting up these meetings and taking notes in them and distributing notes/tracking followup items etc. Any customer meeting without notes/write up is a warning sign of problems. OTOH PMs must also be looking out ahead of where customers are at/what is coming next. My grandest description of a (B2B) PMs role is to map the technology/product to solve business problems for customers, understand the detail around that, understand how to measure the value delivered, and measure that, and understand the competition and where the industry is going. It's a very much heads outside the minutiae of development role merged with the conflicting need to be on top of what is going on today with product delivery (without micromanaging that). It's easier with a PM team where you can split up parts of that role.

I *hate* PMs who think it's their job to micromanage engineering. Run standups etc. It's really easy for those PMs to get "busy" being project managers and not actually deliver high-value product management. Unfortunately it's often not an individual staff problem but an organizational one.

My preference was to work with engineering closely but they drive technical aspects of things, especially by them writing up 'speclets' aka design proposals for critical parts. (similar to Oxide but you folks do it so much better). Engineering managers/leads/project managers should be on top of what is going on with development and able to communicate that to the PM/rest of the team.