What is the right PM to Eng ratio? I’m the first PM and we have 8 engineers and 1 Designer.

Question

DJ Chung · Accepted Answer

Don't think there's a "right" ratio, but I would say 1 PM to 6-12 engineers is a good ratio. I think beyond 12 engineers, it gets a little difficult for a PM to stay on top of projects and the PM could become a bottlenect to project progress. I would also say 1 designer to 6-12 engineers is a good rule of thumb.

Milena Krasteva · Answer

1:10 is what has been used as a rule of thumb in my experience. A PM wears many hats. If you don't have a program manager (pgm/tpm) 30% - 40% of the PM's time may be going into project management activities and you may need an extra PM (or your first TPM) You may be supplementing other functions in the org: marketing, sales, solution consulting, BD. The point here is to assess what are the org needs and what role PM is playing or ought to be playing. It might not be a matter of how many PMs to Eng ratio. How would an extra PM accelerate the busines? If you were the CEO how would you best invest in the next available headcount - an engineer? a data scientist? Any other vs PM? Also worth thinking who else in your org is acting like a PM already - founders?

Ingo Wiegand · Answer

* The right PM to Eng ratio depends on a couple of different factors, many of which can from my perspective be boiled down to 1) the overall stage and scale of the company and 2) the nature of the product you are working on. Given those dependencies, it also makes sense to revisit this decision at key turning points of your product (or company).
 * Practically speaking, the traditional ‘2 pizza box team’ of 8-10 engineers per PM is a decent baseline to start with. Here are a few example considerations of how I would think about adjusting this ratio for individual teams based on scale and product considerations:

Scale

* Larger scale for an R&D organization usually implies an increased need for coordination and likely more ‘interfaces’ (e.g., there are more product and engineering teams, more platform-wide services, APIs etc.) and in many cases this maturity also brings technical complexity. All of these factors might indicate that a single PM can cover a wider range of engineers, so even a ratio of 1:15 might work in those cases. This doesn’t necessarily mean that a single engineering team needs to hit that size, but PMs might start work that naturally spans multiple (potentially cross-functional) engineering teams
 * Smaller companies can usually start out with an 8-10 engineer per PM ratio and then adjust based on growth trajectory. In hyper-growth scenarios, PM capacity can become a bottleneck, especially when it comes to B2B/Enterprise-oriented products, where in-depth knowledge and a clear articulation of specific customer processes and varying user personas might increase the need for more dedicated PM bandwidth (and critical product trade-offs), adjusting the ratio to 1:6 could temporarily make sense

Nature of the Product

* A product or feature with high user complexity (e.g., enterprise operations workflows with varying business needs, complex business logic) or high initial business uncertainty (e.g., first foray into a new market) might warrant more PM bandwidth and an adjusted PM to Eng ratio of 5-6 engineers per PM
 * On the opposite end of the spectrum, lower user complexity (or generally higher Eng complexity) would lead me to move towards a ratio that skews towards more engineers per PM (typical examples here could be AI/ML-driven features that might require a wider range of technical expertise and teams to succeed)

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