I still am trying to decide what's a better balance.
If you're too tech/engineering oriented you have a higher chance of not becoming/continuing as a viable business (DEC was a perfect example of this).
Swing too far the other way and the tech suffers and in theory you open yourself up to better alternatives or it becomes too burdensome to innovate as tech debt builds and the PMs refuse to deal with it until it becomes so acute that it drives away your better talent. Worse is that by this time the original PMs have moved on under the impression they did amazing and somebody else is cleaning up the mess.
In theory with scrum/agile, it's the engineers who pick up the backlog and work on what they feel is important to move forward (be it features, security, tech debt, etc), but in practice the PMs usually have the control.
If you're too tech/engineering oriented you have a higher chance of not becoming/continuing as a viable business (DEC was a perfect example of this).
Swing too far the other way and the tech suffers and in theory you open yourself up to better alternatives or it becomes too burdensome to innovate as tech debt builds and the PMs refuse to deal with it until it becomes so acute that it drives away your better talent. Worse is that by this time the original PMs have moved on under the impression they did amazing and somebody else is cleaning up the mess.
In theory with scrum/agile, it's the engineers who pick up the backlog and work on what they feel is important to move forward (be it features, security, tech debt, etc), but in practice the PMs usually have the control.