This past year has been a tough one for the tech industry at large. Still in 2024, more and more layoffs are happening daily. Last week alone (the second week of January), we saw Twitch, Discord, Google and more have layoffs; it’s no wonder that thousands of Software Engineers say the job market is getting worse! I want to talk about a different angle, one that isn’t as broadly covered in the mainstream media: how this impacts the Product and Program Management job functions. As there was another layoff last week that hits close to home: Instagram laid off all Technical Program Managers (TPM), consolidating them into the Product Management (PM) function.
If you’ve been reading with me for the past year, you’ll know that I am about to say something controversial: kudos on following my advice, Meta. Before you come at me with pitchforks 🔱, allow me to explain myself!
When I last wrote about what to do instead of quarterly planning, I did not mention the word “budgeting” once. While everything said in that post is true, to dismiss budgeting leaves a huge gap that has to be addressed. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires that publicly traded companies file both quarterly and annual reports on an ongoing basis. While financial forecasts are not a part of these requirements, it has become the norm to do so. In order to provide more accurate financial forecasts, most publicly traded companies adopt a budgeting process. However, budgeting only tells one half of the story: spend. To get the other half – revenue – you want to understand projected product and feature releases with associated revenue forecasts. This gives you both sides of the coin for your overall financial forecasts. However, it leads to the conflation of budgeting and planning, and creates a game to be exploited no matter how you slice it.
As tech layoffs continue, including Return to Office (RTO) mandates which cause attrition by design, there has been a very real pressure to focus on “efficiency” in 2023 that I am starting to see carry into 2024 plans. Meta went so far as to dub 2023 “the year of efficiency.” This focus makes sense given the macro economic state and a pace of rising interest rates not seen in 40 years. *But how?*
Coupled with the focus on efficiency, the general industry sentiment is that engineering teams are getting slower. And to that I would say: they are right. We seem to have forgotten what we know from Mythical Man Month, which I will summarize as “the fastest way to slow down a project is to add more people to it.” Despite this, the software industry has grown immensely. For example, Meta’s employee count has an exponential growth shape. While rounds of layoffs will cut this number for 2023, the shape is still exponential and the size of organizations have increased tremendously; it is due to this size increase that the sentiment of slower engineering teams arises. *So, what are we going to do about it?*
Read the post and find out!
Open LinkedIn – seriously, do it. I bet it’ll take no longer than five seconds to stumble upon a post with the word “strategy” in it. And I bet you’ll read it and go – “huh?” The example I found was along the lines of “just do these 10 easy steps and you’ll define everything you need for your entire company.”
I admit, this line from Good Strategy/Bad Strategy hits home: “A hallmark of true expertise and insight is making a complex subject understandable. A hallmark of mediocrity and bad strategy is unnecessary complexity—a flurry of fluff masking an absence of substance.”
Here’s a good rule of thumb: if you need more than one sentence to describe what a strategy is, you’re doing it wrong. This post will help you do it right!
