Blurring Product and Engineering Roles Leads to Burnout, Argues Teresa Torres

In a recent LinkedIn post, Teresa Torres digs into the often-unspoken tension between product management and engineering roles, particularly concerning the boundaries of responsibility. Torres, alongside Petra Wille, highlights a common struggle where product managers find themselves increasingly involved in tasks like bug tracking, managing technical debt, and even system architecture. This, she explains, can lead to significant burnout for product managers and ultimately compromise the quality of the product.

The Perils of Blurred Boundaries

Torres emphasizes that while the intention might be to be helpful, product managers taking on engineering responsibilities can have detrimental effects. She points out the core issue: the confusion over ownership and accountability. As Teresa Torres notes in her post:

“Product managers are not people managers for engineers—and shouldn’t be accountable for engineering quality.”

This blurring of lines, according to Torres, often stems from outdated organizational mindsets, such as legacy IT structures and the pervasive myth of the “CEO of the product.” These frameworks can inadvertently position product managers as overseers of engineering work, rather than collaborators focused on the product vision.

Rethinking Collaboration and Ownership

The discussion unpacks what healthy collaboration between product and engineering truly looks like in modern product development environments. A key distinction made by Torres is between being responsible for a product’s success and owning another team’s specialized work. She argues that the product trio—typically product management, product design, and product engineering—should collectively own the ‘what’ (the product vision and strategy), while engineering is responsible for the ‘how’ (the technical implementation).

Torres illustrates this with a crucial point about quality issues. Instead of product managers getting bogged down in individual bug fixes, she suggests a systemic approach. According to Teresa Torres:

“If quality is a problem, the solution is escalating and fixing the system, not managing individual bugs.”

This perspective underscores the importance of strong engineering leadership, which should be empowered to own technical decisions and quality assurance processes. Torres also highlights that skilled engineering teams naturally push back when boundaries are crossed, viewing this not as resistance, but as a positive sign of healthy ownership and expertise.

Practical Steps Towards Clearer Roles

To address these challenges, Torres offers practical takeaways for creating clearer ownership. She advocates for establishing direct communication channels between stakeholders and engineering teams for tasks like bug tracking, bypassing the product manager as a central bottleneck. This can involve leveraging shared tools, dashboards, or dedicated communication channels.

Furthermore, Torres stresses the importance of escalating systemic quality issues to engineering leadership. She advises against product managers becoming the default point of contact for technical details they are not equipped to manage. In her words:

“If your org expects product teams—not IT teams—to handle these [engineering] responsibilities, advocate for real engineering leadership.”

Ultimately, Teresa Torres’s insights from this discussion provide a valuable framework for organizations seeking to foster more effective, less burnout-prone product development environments by respecting and clarifying the distinct, yet collaborative, roles of product and engineering.