You are right. For better or worse, we have not had traditional PMs at GitHub. Often that is a role played by what we call a PRP (primarily responsible person). That person is often an engineer or designer.
Personally, I very much like the organic approach to PM'ing products you guys are pioneering, even if this particular project didn't go anywhere. I want to move away from a software culture where Important People hand down mandates to the developer masses. If the PM function can be accomplished organically, e.g., by one or two people who have opinions about where the project should go along with the ability to inspire others in that direction, and this works, it seems to me like such an arrangement would be far preferable.
> Often that is a role played by what we call a PRP (primarily responsible person).
So Github doesn't have managers, it just has Primary Responsible People, who sound an awful like they do the same thing? Just don't call them "managers", because you don't have those. Cute.
Every successful startup eventually discovers that the O(n^2) communication overhead of a perfectly flat org doesn't scale, and needs to adapt to deal with that. The question is whether to develop coordination specialists implicitly or explicitly. Developing doublespeak to protect an idealistic worldview from its incompatibility with reality does seem pathological.
The biggest difference is that our "PRPs" don't see management as their primary responsibility. They're still an engineer or designer first.
> Every successful startup eventually discovers that the O(n^2) communication overhead of a perfectly flat org doesn't scale, and needs to adapt to deal with that. The question is whether to develop coordination specialists implicitly or explicitly.
Yep. This is certainly something we feel the pain of and are wrestling with right now.
> Developing doublespeak to protect an idealistic worldview from its incompatibility with reality does seem pathological.
By definition, we don't have anyone that plays the role of "manager" right now (again, for better or worse). I wouldn't call that doublespeak.
The difference being that instead of having someone who is a "project manager", i.e. that's their job title, all they do is manage and set deadlines and such, you have one of your regular people be the responsible person for some project.
Guessing this is what you mean by "implicitly".
It nicely solves a recurrent enterprise problem where PMs have as their primary duty "go to meetings all day every day" and don't have any understanding of what precisely they're managing.
