What is a good product manager to engineer ratio to maintain as you scale?

The ideal product manager-to-engineer ratio can vary depending on the nature and complexity of the products being developed, the size and stage of the organization, and other factors such as the development process, company culture, and resources available. However, a common rule of thumb is to aim for a ratio of 1 product manager to 8-10 engineers. This ratio provides enough product management oversight and guidance to the engineering team while allowing engineers to have enough autonomy and ow ...Read More

To me, this is less a question of literally number of PM bodies to engineering bodies; that depends on the company, its context, the complexity of its products, and many other factors. Instead, the way I think about this problem is mapping PMs to the number of logical domains within a company's product. A senior+ PM should be able to own a single domain, with its own KPIs, goals, and product strategy. Typically, this aligns a PM with an engineering manager over that domain, and underneath that E ...Read More

PM to engineer ratios can range wildly from 1 PM to every 2-3 engineers to something 1 PM to 15 engineers. This largely depends on the size of the company and the type of product. In a more entertainment context, like a gaming start-up, you might have leaner engineering teams with more PMs to develop the ideas and concepts for all of the experiences. In a scaled big tech company you might require many engineers and teams to work across all the platforms involved, so the ratio of a PM and product ...Read More

Product manager to engineer ratio can range from 1 PM to 5 or 6 engineers all the way to 1 PM to 10 to 12 engineers. It all depends on the seniority of the product manager as well as the company and product stage.  Few areas to consider as you scale:  Make sure there is sufficient product management and engineering capacity to get feedback from customers and improve existing functionality as well as have the capacity to prototype and build new features to grow the customer base.  Periodically ev ...Read More

I'll share a few examples from my career that I've seen, with some context. In the end, PMs don't just do one thing, so their bandwidth will vary based on what the team needs from them and what support they have. As a new PM at a ~200 people startup, I started by working with 3 engineers. We didn't have a designer on the team, and I had to do a lot of work to write very detailed product specifications, project manage delivery of initiatives, test solutions, etc. As I became more senior at that s ...Read More