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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