Episode 1
Jordan Dunne: What Engineers Should Know about Product and Program Management
Jordan Dunne works as a Technical Program Manager at Google Payments. He previously worked as a Program Manager at Microsoft, Lead Forward-Deployed Engineer at Enlitic, and Product Manager at Vim. Learn more about Jordan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanwdunne/
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Timestamps:
(02:00) How were you exposed to CS and why did you pursue it?
(03:25) Is software engineering actually engineering?
(06:40) How do you define product management?
(11:05) When did you realize you wanted to be a PM instead of a developer?
(16:40) Project vs Program vs Product Management
(18:35) Effective PM as leverage on a dev team
(24:05) What can engineers do to make PM's lives easier?
(26:10) Companies moving towards technical PMs?
(30:20) Handling the added uncertainty from Data/ML products
(42:00) ML models held to a higher standard than their human equivalents
(45:15) Why are Xoogle PMs so successful?
(52:10) Google's and Boeing's cultures influenced by their business models
(56:00) "Needless complexity" in PM
(59:00) Getting better at estimation
(01:04:00) Knowing ML evaluation metrics as a PM
(01:06:30) Getting better at communication
(01:14:20) Prioritizing what to learn
(01:16:50) Keeping the big picture in mind
(01:20:00) Rapid fire questions
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