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Round 1: Product Management v Development

Lawrence Mandel
Sep 5, 2018 · 4 min read

Thoughts on why tension and distrust exists between these roles

At this year’s Canadian Tech @ Scale conference, I facilitated a discussion about the tension and distrust that can exist between product managers and developers, who often feel like they’re on different teams with different goals. This discussion surfaced a number of issues and touched on some suggested changes that you can make to build a healthier relationship between people in these roles.

Source of tension and distrust

There are a number of reasons why developers distrust product managers:

  • Product managers often come to developers with a solution, not a problem, and in this way do not involve developers in the intellectual work. Developers aren’t just doers. They’re creators and want to be involved.
  • It’s all about context and product managers often have context that’s not shared with developers. This puts developers in a position where they do not understand motivation and decisions. The most obvious case is that developers do not understand the reason for deadlines and see deadlines as arbitrary.
  • Anyone outside of the development team, including product managers, is seen as less technical and less capable. Put simply, developers think they know better. This issue is exacerbated by the difficulty in hiring good product managers.
  • It’s hard for product managers to make perfect decisions. We don’t have data for everything. Problems are often ill defined and edge cases are not thought through.
  • Product managers may assume they know how development works without ever having worked as a developer. This can come across as arrogance or just result in unrealistic expectations of schedule, complexity, or workload.
  • Technical debt, security, and compliance are important to developers but often are lower priority for product managers when creating the product roadmap.
  • Product managers often make it feel like they’re the boss. In fact, developers may feel like they have three bosses: product manager, engineering manager, and technical lead. There can also be a power imbalance with founders and other senior people playing product roles at smaller companies.

There are a number of reasons product managers distrust developers:

  • It’s difficult as a product manager to fully specify a solution and there is a difference between what is asked and what developers ultimately build.
  • Developers don’t understand user personas, business cases, and necessary metrics for product success.
  • There is a power imbalance from the numbers with a typical 1:6 ratio of product managers to developers.
  • Companies often start with a development team and add a product team later. In these cases, developers get used to building whatever they want and aren’t open to direction from others.
  • Junior developers are quick to please and will do whatever product managers ask them to do even if that means building a system in a way where it can’t continue to be built effectively.
  • Developers try to build a perfect product. They’ll spend time yak shaving and in doing so break down the development process and project delivery timeline.

Building the relationship

Our discussion concluded with suggested changes that can be made to build effective and productive relationships between product managers and developers:

  • Increase transparency by involving developers in the process from the beginning. Have development review design specs. Ensure that product managers are accessible to developers.
  • Every requirement should have a high level why so that everyone can appreciate the full context. You can do this by practicing Behaviour Driven Development.
  • Provide developers with context but not with meetings by sharing written updates with the team.
  • Developers should be informed and take the time to learn the business so that they can challenge product decisions with an informed position and in a positive way.
  • Technical debt, security, and compliance issues should be framed as business risk in order to help product managers prioritize appropriately.
  • Have product managers own all the teams needed to build the product. In this way they’re challenged to care about the overall product including things like technical debt.
  • Use retrospectives as a tool to flag communication issues.
  • Do not have customer driven deadlines and do not share the roadmap with customers. Doing so creates timeline pressure, causes stress, and results in poor decision making.
  • Everyone should work on positive communication and empathy. Understand the limitations of other teams and realize that you’re actually all on the same team.

Product manager or developer we’re all part of the same team. If you find yourself in a place where the relationship between these roles is contentious know that it doesn’t have to be this way. Several people shared that their teams work in a collaborative, respectful, and harmonious way. Look for the underlying source of tension in your relationship and then work on ways to eliminate the tension. You should now have some ideas to get you started.

Lawrence Mandel

Written by

Dad. Director of Production Engineering @Shopify. Formerly @Mozilla, @IBM, @EclipseFdn, @TheASF. Youth Baseball and Hockey Coach. Charity Fundraiser.

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