Where I was going with this is PM is a hard job and not for everyone.
I know people who became a PM assuming the PM has the power to make the decisions. BUT you need to work with the CTO to create the vision, validate demand, get you idea, work with marketing to announce it, identify design partner customers, work with designers and work with Engineers to agree on the MVP, oversee delivery, get the docs written, get support trained, run the early access program, enable the field, and finally work with marketing to the release your product. AND - by the way - none of these people report to you. How do you do it? Politics are unavoidable.
And let’s say you do all these things exceptionally well — guess what? Nobody will ever be satisfied with the decisions and tradeoffs you made. When things go wrong you will get blamed, and when things go well sales makes the bonus and Engineers are praised. There will be long stretches where you wonder if it’s all worth it.
BUT there is nothing like delivering something customers love and it makes it all seem worth it. Hang in there. :-)
Sounds terrible and nobody should but subjected to this sort of work environment.
Not sure how the story ends because I stopped reading just after ... "which I wrote about in my bestselling (!!!) book Production-Ready Microservices."
There is no disputing the financial model behind AWS Lambda is revolutionary. I know of a visitor NDA signing service that charges $5 per visitor. The backend runs entirely on AWS API Gateway and Lamdba and their cost per visitor transaction to AWS is $0.25. Think about how powerful this is! Now you can develop an app in your spare time and bring it to market for practically nothing. Once developed, your fix infrastructure costs are zero.
That said, there are financial benefits on premise too. Short lived processes that need 1 CPU and 512Mb memory are ideal candidates for oversubscription. If you had a server where CPU utilization never peaked beyond 60% and 15Gb memory was free then you could fit 20 Lambda functions in this 'slack capacity' without resource contention. Driving up utilization when the cost of the server is sunk is effectively capacity for free.
Given:: 1. You have an idea 2. You register a domain 3. You setup email 4. You setup your build your app 5. You deploy your app
... why don’t AWS and Azure compete with GoDaddy to capture these leads?
Google App Engine used to offer this and it’s didn’t result in a viable business.
I’m sure AWS and Azure have considered the same and concluded the quantity and/or quality of leads was determined too low to justify the investment.