Don’t piss off your engineer! Learn from the best Product Managers
How awesome Product Managers work with Engineering
“The Product Manager is the CEO of the product…”
Now that’s a phrase I get a bit tired of hearing.
Because when we are taking an honest look at the job of a PM, it’s all about facilitating.
As Product Manager you make sure everyone can do their job so the team effort produces an awesome product.
One of your main speaking partners is the engineering department. Now, they don’t need to wait for a product manager to tell them what to develop. I’ve seen it often enough. But you as a PM won’t have a product if you can’t work it out with your engineers.
So, let’s look at what engineers expect from you and how you can help them to contribute to the product’s success.
What does an awesome PM bring to the table working with his engineers?
- Specification and Backlog
- Empathy
- Technical Understanding
- Communication
- Lean Development
Specification and Backlog
Write and maintain an actionable, data-based specification and prioritize the backlog
When it comes to give direction for product development, engineers expect the PM to bring them:
a) requirements which are based on customer needs
b) a specification which describes properties of a solution to a real problem
The engineers need a detailed specification to get to work.
They need you to support them in understanding the customer problem and needs.
A good way to do this are very detailed and specific use cases:
- Don’t specify the technology and how to solve the problem
- They should be based on real data from customers, experiments and research, not guessed
- Know minimum acceptable feature set for fast validation to reduce unnecessary work for engineering.
- Go for maximum clarity. Keep it as simple as possible, reduce complexity and overhead
As you create the spec and get ready to hand it over, take the time to work through it in the team to ensure a common understanding.
“Good product managers come to engineers with problems, rather than solutions and let the engineers present a wide array of solutions with tradeoffs.” (Source)
On top, you are expected to prioritize items in the backlog. This means being aware of trade-offs. Also, effectively saying “no” to Features out of scope to keep the roadmap lean.
During development engineering benefits from you doing regular check ins to further clarify spec if needed.
Sometimes you will need to be open to re-prioritize backlog items. Your decisions should be well founded in data and the reasoning clearly explained.
Empathy
Let the engineers to do their job
As Product Manager you are expected by engineering to understand the highly creative nature of their job.
So, leave them the freedom to do their job. This means don’t specify the solution or explain how to do it. They are expected and happy to come up with possible technical solutions.
The job of an engineer takes time and much to our horror, it often doesn’t go according to schedule.
They expect you to work with their estimation of the needed time and allow for some buffer. Otherwise you need to cut down on the scope to not pressure developers to “burn the midnight oil”.
Welcome creative solutions and allow thinking “outside the spec”. A lot of good can come from giving 20% of time for other tasks (20% rule as it’s use at Google).
You are also expected to grasp the value of refactoring, testing, quality code. This means you need to allocate some time to fix the so-called “technical debt” caused by hacking.
To give engineers feedback about the effectiveness of their creativity, review success metrics together.
Technical Understanding
Bring some basic understanding of technology
Of course engineers don’t expect us to be able to code in depth. But we should be able to talk about the underlying technology and not just the user interface.
It helps to show a sincere interest in understanding the tech by asking the engineers for explanations in layman’s terms.
In the end it is important for us to know what different solutions can do and and how they are limited.
To an understanding of tech comes the good understanding of the own product. Plus, we should have a rough understanding how the competitor products work.
That also helps to avoid pissing off the sales guy later on.
Communication
Fair and transparent communication
One of the main functions of a PM is an effective communication across all departments.
Foremost you want to openly preach the product vision. People need to know where we expect the value of the product to come from.
This is crucial for the engineers who use the big picture as guidance in their small day to day decisions.
Additionally, the basic rules of successful communication and team work apply:
- Take time to build and foster rapport.
- Don’t piss off the engineers by keeping them in the dark. They will benefit from clear, transparent, honest communication.
- Always be quick to give credit and share sucess
Assume that engineers are capable of giving valuable input and feedback. Be open to new ideas, even if they conflict with the current vision.
Lean Development
Reduce inefficiencies, waste, and friction
Finally we can help the team to excel if we keep time wasters away from them.
- Don’t use or force a process for the sake of it. As in the agile manifesto, we want to put people before process.
- Because every interruption can cost roughly 5–15 min “refocusing time” we should avoid frequent interruptions during the day.
- Abrupt reprioritization during a task or sprint brings an even higher cost. So be sure any changes are absolutely necessary (=important and urgent) and in line with the scope.
- A major pain for engineers are constant meetings that drag out too long. Try to reduce the number of meeting by considering the real cost of attendants. This can easily amount to a 5–6 figure sum per year.
Conclusion
Invest time in understanding how to support your engineers to do their job.
Your product and your stakeholders will thank you ;)
Daniel Sontag connects the bots: As Industry 4.0 lead and manager for connected products, he does what he loves — tying business to tech, and theory to practice.
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