Gahh, this sentiment from product managers drives me nuts. IMO you will never have the best engineers work for you, because the best are very good at making product decisions / knowing the business in addition to excellent engineering skills.

To me this is the single most differentiating philosophy between great product managers and very mediocre ones.

The statement was:

> "being good at engineering doesn't qualify you for managing product"

Which is demonstrably true. They're two different skillsets. If we reversed the statement:

> being good at product management doesn't qualify you for engineering

We could also agree on that statement. That doesn't mean that there aren't engineers who are/could be kickass product managers, and it doesn't mean that there aren't product managers who could sit down and build the application.

But they're two different roles. Product managers are supposed to identify problems, design requirements, provide engineering with clear context and business data to help inform the priority, and then engineering should get to, based on that information, build the best solution.

Knowing what's needed and knowing what customers will actually buy is two different things...

I'll take it one step further and say being really good at engineering means you don't need anyone else managing product