The Two-Week Deputization Rule
Under two engineering weeks, the engineer is the PM; over two weeks, the PM owns it
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 85%
With AI making engineers 2-3x more productive, PMs and designers are squeezed managing a much larger effective team. Amol's answer is a bright-line ownership rule: any project needing two weeks of engineering time or less is fully owned by a product-minded engineer acting as mini-PM — including talking to security, legal, and cross-functional stakeholders — with the PM only advising. Projects over two weeks default back to PM ownership. The rule frees scarce PM attention for the highest-leverage work: sharpening the why and the what.
Origin
Amol Avasare's formalization at Anthropic's growth team of the long-standing practice of hiring product-minded engineers, made necessary by AI-driven engineering leverage stretching PM and design capacity.
Core principles
- 01AI leverage lands hardest on engineering, so org strain shows up on PM and design — solve it by redistributing ownership, not just hiring
- 02Deputize product-minded engineers as mini-PMs for bounded work so PMs aren't the bottleneck
- 03A clean size threshold (two engineering weeks) removes case-by-case negotiation
- 04A PM's highest-leverage move at scale is improving the why and what by a few percent, not shipping the 21st feature
- 05The rule is a heuristic, not a law — override it with judgment when a small project is unusually controversial
How to run it
- 1
Size the project in engineering-weeks
Estimate the engineering time. Two weeks or less is 'small'; more than two weeks is 'large.' This single measure routes ownership.
Pro tip Two weeks mirrors the classic test that a PM can go on vacation for a couple of weeks and a project with momentum will still run fine.
- 2
For small projects, make the engineer the PM
Put a product-minded engineer squarely on the hook to drive it end-to-end: talking to security, legal, and cross-functional stakeholders. The PM gets looped in and advises but does not execute.
Pro tip This only works with genuinely product-minded engineers — for them, deputization multiplies their value by an order of magnitude.
Watch out Not every engineer can do this; assign the mini-PM role only to those who can step into it.
- 3
For large projects, keep the PM squarely accountable
Default to PM ownership for anything over two engineering weeks. The PM delegates more to engineering than before but remains squarely accountable for the outcome.
- 4
Override with judgment on controversy
The cut isn't fully clean. A one-week project that is extremely controversial should probably still be PM-driven. Use your head rather than applying the threshold mechanically.
Watch out Treating the two-week line as inviolable will hand a politically dangerous small project to someone without the standing to navigate it.
- 5
Reinvest freed PM time in the why and what
With engineers handling small projects, redirect PM capacity away from shipping incremental features toward improving the team's opportunity selection — getting the why and what a few percent better is enormously high-leverage.
Pro tip A PM who improves the why and what by 5% in a 20-engineer org is a higher-leverage hire than one shipping a 21st feature.
In the wild
A default team of five engineers, one designer, one PM becomes, with Claude Code, effectively 15-20 engineers, ~1.5-2 PMs, and ~1.5-2 designers — the same headcount but far more output, straining PM and design.
→ Anthropic responds by hiring more growth PMs and formally deputizing product-minded engineers as mini-PMs for sub-two-week projects, making product-minded engineers 'an absolute unicorn.'
Common mistakes
Assuming AI leverage just means 'hire more engineers'
When execution bottlenecks break you must ask whether it's a headcount-ratio problem or an underlying technological shift; defaulting to more engineers ignores that the real strain is now on PM and design.
Applying the two-week line mechanically
Handing a one-week but highly controversial project to an engineer just because it's under the threshold ignores that some small projects need a PM's cross-functional standing — the rule requires judgment.
Is it for you?
Best for
Scaled product and growth orgs where AI has multiplied engineering output and PM/design capacity has become the bottleneck
Not ideal for
Small early-stage companies with little cross-functional coordination, where a single PM should just ship and all-hands-on-deck beats formal ownership rules
From the transcript
“if a project is less than is two weeks of engineering time or less, then the the engineer is on the hook to effectively be…”
“If a project is more than two engineering weeks, then the default is that the PM should continue to to be on the hook”
“just deputize the engineers to be mini PMs”
From the episode
Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point”
Amol Avasare