Product and Engineer Collaboration Is the Key to Big Wins
Product and engineering teams go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Peas and carrots. Chips and guacamole. On their own, they’re fine. Together? POW. That’s the magic.
The most successful product teams I’ve been a part of were those where I had a solid technical co-owner to stand shoulder to shoulder with against the headwinds of getting a product to market. I felt as though I had a true partner in those people and knew I was never alone. When things got tough, we were in the war rooms together, building on each other's ideas and strengths to find the right solution to the problem.
Now that I coach, I want every product team to experience that kind of camaraderie and intellectual challenge. Once you experience it, you’ll never want to work another way!
So many teams operate in functional silos, with product teams focusing on customer problems, embedded in the business, doing the design and discovery, and then throwing it “over the wall” to IT to build. (I mean, that’s the words we use: “the wall.” Like there’s an actual structure so big and tall and insurmountable, we have to throw things over it rather than meet someone at the seam and talk it through.)
I get it. There’s a natural tension between product and engineering team, and it can be rocky at times. But I posit that the tension is actually a constraint that can lead us to better outcomes, if managed appropriately.
The Reality of Product and Engineer Collaboration
Product and engineering can often be a relationship filled with misconceptions, assumptions, and frustrations.
Here’s what I see play out at company after company:
Engineers can see product managers as overly focused on the process, the artifacts, or as "show boaters" who love to walk around doing all the product thinking and problem-solving. They get tied up in the glossy stuff and don't care about what's under the hood — they just throw it over the wall for IT to build to their specifications.
Engineers (architects, developers, QA, release managers, etc.) are viewed as order takers or coding nerds without a single strategic or creative bone in their body. The common perception is that engineers sit, toiling along on their black screens, happily squirreled away where they don't have to interact with the other humans. They don't care about the fancy story behind the work — they want to get right to the requirements so they can do their thing.
Neither of these “takes” is the whole picture. Like most generalizations, when people take a slice of the whole and exaggerate it to fulfill the narrative, it rarely leads to a productive solution, just more frustration.
Often, the relationship degenerates to the point of dysfunction, with plenty of us/them thinking to go around. It can be difficult to reset, but doing so is critical to the product's success and the ability to serve the customer.
Reframing the Product and Engineer Collaboration
In my experience, engineers are some of the most creative, strategic people around. If you're not using them to help define the product strategy or participate in discovery work, you're leaving a massive amount of value on the table. On the other hand — engineering leaders — have you tapped into the creativity, wealth of consumer knowledge, and organization of your product partners?
Product leaders must synthesize a ton of information from customers, the market, the business, and its competitors. Engineers understand how the pipes work, and know that there is a smart way and a not-so-smart way to create technical solutions. Fast and cheap now might paint the product into a corner that will be expensive to get out of later. Those are vastly different territories that require the capacity and expertise of each discipline to really cover.
But if product and engineering don’t ever come together to rationalize and harmonize those areas of knowledge and expertise, the product suffers because the team makes decisions absent a true picture of the issues at play.
Like in all good relationships, your intentions, ideas, and decisions need to be squared up. Here’s how to make sure that you are working toward that kind of relationship:
Protect one another's time
Engineers can't do their best work if they are shut out of all the decision-making and problem-solving discussions. They also can't do their best work if they do nothing but sit in meetings all day.
Similarly, a PM or PO who is in every single solution discussion won't have time for anything else.
Work together to find the sweet spot and help each other extend capacity by sharing summaries of work done independently. Regular co-working and planning sessions will help make sure you’re sharing what you learn and feeding that into the decisions that must be made for the product design and architecture.Patience is a skill — develop it
Product might ask some "dumb" questions when they want to try to understand technical constraints or why a particular solution is being recommended. Engineers might appear to do the same when they press on a design or UX decision, or are trying to understand the customer’s need or the intent of a user story. Be patient, and assume positive intent — both teams are seeking to understand to get to a better outcome.Be vulnerable
If you don't know much about the platform or the customer experience (current or future), ask your product/engineering partner to be your tutor to learn more about each other’s work. It will serve both of you and help create a more authentic relationship. I’ve seen teams bluster and pose to hide from the other team that they lack skill or experience in a particular area. But in almost all cases, that gap in knowledge exists on both sides, and admitting you need to learn more is a marker of a growth mindset which creates more opportunities than a fixed one.
Finding the Win-Win Scenarios
Product management and engineering aren’t easy disciplines, and anyone who tells you differently is selling you something. Individually, there are constraints like budgets and legacy systems and market disruptors and tech debt to contend with. Wouldn’t it feel better to shift from an us-vs-them posture into one where you felt as though you had a teammate, a partner to share the burdens of the work, and to collaborate with to find elegant solutions to the unending stream of problems?
Yeah, I thought so. It’s possible, so keep working at it. It’s worth it.