When product, engineering, and design don’t sync
Product management is dead, long live product management!
Most of us are familiar with Marty Cagan and Teresa Torres’s concept of a product trio. We also know that when these three legs of the stool don’t work together in harmony, it’s like trying to balance on a single leg — you’re bound to fall.
Yet, companies are actively removing their product managers and are cutting off a leg of that stool. If product is so important, why do they do this?
The software blame game
Simply put, disconnects between the trio make it so unstable that cutting off a leg doesn’t make it worse.
Way too many product trios go to war with one another. Product managers might say their designers won’t listen or engineers move too slow. Engineers might complain about product managers giving them impossible tasks with no input accepted. Designers might feel like they’re being treated as tools rather than partners in the design process.
This lack of trust and communication can quickly escalate into a never-ending cycle of finger-pointing, blame-shifting, and ego-driven decision-making. It’s not uncommon to see teams start “sneaking around” each other, with product managers going directly to engineering or designers without involving their counterparts.
But what happens when we don’t have this level of collaboration? We get stuck in a waterfall silo mentality, where leadership finds a problem, product finds a solution, design makes it look nice, engineer executes, QA tests, and then product marketing launches. You become a feature factory. This approach is slow, siloed, and often results in subpar products that fail to meet customer needs.
You’ll know your team is in danger if you’ve ever said or been told, “that’s not your role.”
How did we get here?
The product management role has a long, complicated history, yet we’ve seemingly gone full circle. Product roles were invented to create an owner for the quality and impact of the stuff teams built. Everyone else wanted to do their main jobs. It made sense to assign the alignment, impact, and quality of those jobs to a new resource.
The original need for a product manager was to be the voice of the customer and the product, tying everything together. But today, many organizations are stuck with product managers who follow a set of written procedures and responsibilities day in and day out without any real flexibility or collaboration.
How can you be the voice of something if you’re predefining what that voice should say?
Instead of owning an outcome, product managers are owning the solution. They have to find the answers to problems they’re handed.
As a result, we get into a self-feeding nightmare where everyone is miserable, quality suffers, and we’re no longer thinking about the customer, cohesiveness, or impact. We’re just trying to prove that we’re right and keep our jobs.
So, what’s the alternative?
Swap responsibilities for influence.
I’d argue that true cross-functional collaboration is key. Business leadership, engineering, design, QA, and product marketing all need to work together seamlessly to create products that meet customer needs and drive business success.
I know that probably sounds obvious, if not cliche. In practice, though, this proves to be much more challenging. It’s natural to want to slice a step of a workflow off and assign it to an IC.
Product management just doesn’t work like that, though. Product is meant to own the product, not a step or phase.
This means product managers must be present in every single step of the product development process, providing guidance and input with the voice of the customer in mind. They have to do whatever it takes to unblock their teams, get answers to questions, keep everyone happy and aligned.
In lieu of a lengthy job description laying out processes, metrics, workflows, responsibilities, and ceremonies, a product manager’s job description should really say just one thing:
Do whatever it takes to deliver the highest impact possible to our customers and our business.
And the product trio lived happily ever after.
In this scenario, great product managers become coordinators, mediators, and facilitators. They work in the shadows, building trust and rapport with stakeholders, relentlessly researching customers and markets. They become the connection between all other experts, influencing, providing suggestions, asking questions, and understanding others’ points of view.
And when we achieve this level of collaboration, something magical happens. Teams start to rely on each other’s expertise, and everyone wins. We see the impact, and suddenly nobody says “that’s not your role.”
Because every role is about using one’s expertise to serve the customer.
As product managers, it’s our responsibility to tie everything together — to keep the business and the product aligned and valuable through collaboration. By leading with influence, we can avoid the silent stool syndrome and become the wizards that pull it all together.
I’m a product leader who partners with startup teams to help define their path to product success through sustainable, innovative, and empowering product strategies. I extend my passion through coaching and consultation services to build skills, processes, and products, applying my knowledge proven by dozens of launches and product awards. Let’s talk — you can reach out via my website or LinkedIn profile.
