Roles and teams
Engineers-per-PM ratio
Also calledPM to engineer ratio, Product manager ratio
How many engineers each product manager supports. Published figures range from about 3 to 20, and product type moves the number more than company size does.
Ken Norton's informal survey of practitioners landed mostly on five to nine engineers per PM. An older benchmark of large enterprise software companies found ten to twenty. An analysis of about 40,000 open roles in 2026 found roughly 1 PM per 2.7 engineers at AI application companies and 1 per 7.7 at infrastructure companies.
The spread is the finding. Treat any single number as a choice you made for your product type, and say which one.
Common mistake
Presenting one ratio as the benchmark. Figures that range from 1:3 to 1:20 do not have a correct answer, only a defensible one for your context.