Symbiosis: Product and Engineering

Building a Product and Engineering Relationship that Works

Ron Pragides
Sep 4, 2018 · 3 min read

Just over a month ago, the Product and Engineering leaders at my company held a two-day strategy session. The purpose of this gathering was to agree on a vision of where to go, share roadmaps of how to get there, and define measurements to guide our progress.

Holding a strategic offsite allows a team to step away from the daily routine and think purposefully about the future. Consider the activities that take place on the job—most of the time is spent reacting to daily situations. By contrast, time dedicated to a strategic offsite is spent on proactive planning as a team. A joint Product-Engineering offsite is also an opportunity to reinforce the camaraderie required to deliver the right product in the right way.

In the terms of the RACI model:

  • Product Management is responsible for understanding what customers need and defining what will be built.
  • Engineering is responsible for deciding how to build the product and delivering the finished product to market.

Symbiosis between Product Management and Engineering is required for a company to achieve its mission. Our recent offsite is an example of the type of discourse required to build a Product and Engineering relationship that works.

Our VP of Product (Michael Cassin) shared his perspective on successful Product Management. He provided guidance that should be useful for anyone that develops products:

  • Know your customer
  • Be data-driven (versus relying on intuition)
  • Debate vigorously, then commit on a course of action as a team.
  • Hold yourself and your team accountable for results.

Michael also spoke about ownership in terms of the product and solving customer pain-points. He also shared a phrase which I’ve used in my own description of ownership: Don’t admire the problem; Do something about it!

Our Product Management Directors led a session on product strategy. They reminded us of our company mission, provided observations of our target customers, and challenged us to envision a 10x growth in our business. They also reminded us of two of the primary personas of our product, who we’ve playfully named Mike the Marketplace Manager and Eddie the Entrepreneur. Personas are a way to provide the team with shared understanding of the customer.

We shared the top priorities from our Engineering Roadmap, which specifies the technology, tools, and techniques to build our product in a way that is predictable, reliable, scalable, and efficient. We are adopting microservices as a technique to develop software faster (microservices should be relatively small) and with higher quality (strict interfaces to minimize unplanned side-effects, otherwise known as bugs). We also intend to evolve our front-end technologies, improve platform performance, and increase developer productivity.

Two of our Engineering Directors (Raheem Syed, Pierre-Alexandre Lacerte) reminded the group that each week consists of 10,080 minutes and the imperative in spending each of those minutes wisely. They shared lessons learned from two highly recommended books:

Raheem and Pierre also highlighted that great leadership requires a balance between People Focus and Results Focus. This was the thesis of the Harvard Business Review article “Should Leaders Focus on Results or on People?” (an intentionally false choice posed by Matthew Lieberman, PhD).

The group discussed the importance of Measuring Product Performance with these guiding principles:

  • Build Features for Markets—Not Individual Customers
  • Solve for Problems—Not Opinions
  • Are customers using what we build?
  • How much value are they getting?

We also reiterated our commitment to Measuring Engineering Success to achieve the following outcomes:

  • Be better coaches using data rather than intuition
  • Build more effective teams by guiding engineering process and performance conversations through quantitative methods

The two-day offsite was time well spent, but it’s imperative for the ideas to remain in our collective consciousness and drive our decisions every day. That is, until the next time we meet as a joint Product & Engineering leadership team.


Thank you to my AppDirect colleagues who organized and led the Product & Engineering workshop: Michael Cassin, Colin Chong, Hakan Kilic, Jasper Crocker, Julian Gay, Dave Reid, Dominic Lee, Raheem Syed, Santhosh Meleppuram, Pierre-Alexandre Lacerte, Mathew Spolin

Ron Pragides

Written by

VP Engineering at @CartaInc. Previously led teams through IPO at both @Twitter and @Salesforce. Follow me on twitter: @mrp

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