I am hiring for my startup. What is the most optimal Eng/PM ratio?

Hire an EM and give him PM responsibilities.

No matter what you say, an EM role in itself is very lame and useless if you have some senior engineers.

Hiring only a PM without tech background will waste a lot of time and will often missdirect your team.

I vote for 7-1 ratio with the above format.

Interesting question - I’d say also include the quality of PMs you hire a vector.

My startup’s Engg team is composed of a lead engg (9 yrs, systems architect and a great empathetic EM), another senior engg (6 yrs, FE and hands on guy, good engg mentor) + 3 young BE engg freshers who’ve stuck w us for 2 years + 1 FE engg we will hire soon (will probably be a fresher). So 6 in the team. All BITS/IIT.

We’re only 2 technical PMs. Neither of us are ex-software engg - one from IIT other from IIM.

Pro: We have a surprisingly friction-less Engg<>PM relationship. For me execution speed looks like a long term game, slow at the start but as the systems and processes mature, we become faster. We stopped tracking sprints and took a 1project-1pm-1engg approach (FE excluded) - resulted in higher ownership from engg and less internal deflections. Worked very well. 👌

Con: We’re not the fastest but we’re fine w it since it makes our engg’s stint stress-free (apart from occasions client delivery related firefights). PMs also take the load of product delivery and interface w some clients too which overload us. We currently need an APM to help us 😔

Sum up - 5 engg (2 for project mgmt/architecture & key buy/build decisions - 3 for executing) & 2 PMs work well for us. But we do need a +1 in both teams.

Depends a lot on the project and quality of engineers you hire. If you hire junior engineers you will also need a QA.

If you are just starting out getting a systems architect or EM can be prohibitively expensive. You want to test out your product and see if you have PMF. At this you want release a bare bones product that tests your hypothesis in the most lean way possible. So you avoid the bells and whistles and focus on the most important functionality.

At this stage, you can get a senior engineering leader to consult you on the general direction and engineering approach when you kickoff major projects.

3 full stack engineers + 1 QA will give you enough velocity to get you off the ground and iterate quickly

If you already have PMF and are thinking of performance, cost and scale then you for sure need an EM to help take engineering decisions that balance those factors. You may also want more engineers per squad as you will want to add some good to have features in every release.

5 engineers per PM

7 is a good number

1 tech lead
2 senior dev 4 junior dev

This makes a really good pod.

3 engg and 1 PM where 1 eng is TL with 5 yoe with good communication skills and 1 PM with technical background and mba from decent college/ 5 yoe. Rest 2 eng decent in FE and BE.

In early stage I would suggest anywhere bw 1:5 to 1:8 PM to Engineers. Take in subjectivity of your specific use case, roadmap clarity etc. can always work towards improving it later :)

If you're handing over your own responsibility, preferably hire a PM with both technical and business background. Don't cheap out on this, or don't hire right now. Ratio at this early stage should be 1:9-10. Getting a PM with a strong technical background would save you from an EM hiring at this moment.

Don't listen to the diversity heads here bullshitting about more innovation et al. with people from varying background. A PM who can't work with engineers is useless

Great question. A lot of factors needs to be considered

• The product you're building
• The category it's in (so we know if it's Saas for example or something else)
• Current team's efficiency (Maybe make a decision by evaluating how the current team feels like and the major challenges/ lack of clarity or communication they feel, that may have slowed down the process)
• People forget, the core job of a PM is to give clarity to the whole team for the product and decisively divide the long term goal into short term tasks, so the team gets easy wins and the product build is exponential)
• But if you'd ask generally i would say, 1 PM can handle 10 Engineers quite easily.

Let me know if you have anymore questions

Hey I am open for PM role