6 Product Management Tips Engineers Can Use to Drive Their Technical Initiative Forward

Written By: Dorit Dekel Rotman

I recently joined a development team as a product manager (PM), and I was stunned by how passionate the team is. That’s why I was surprised to see the team hesitate when one of our engineers suggested a change to the product infrastructure. This change had the potential to be great, but it would push everyone out of their comfort zones.

This made me understand that although an idea might sound good, selling your initiative is still tough — even if your audience is your own team members, who you have lunch with every day.

That’s when it hit me that this is very similar to the challenges I face in my role and I might be able to help with my product manager influencing superpowers!

As a product manager, I treat any new idea as a product feature that needs to be refined, sold to the relevant stakeholders, and pushed to production.

In this article, I would like to equip you with concrete, actionable tips I learned along the way that can help you and other engineers push your technical initiatives forward.

Real-life use case

To make this a bit more tangible, let’s use a hypothetical example that might help you connect to something you have experienced at your work, and that will also help demonstrate the tips that follow.

Abigail and her team have been working on a new platform that aims to perform content classification for different media types (such as web pages, social media posts, etc). The platform was originally built to optimize one specific metric. It led to a design that ignored CI-CD procedures, so every amendment required a lot of manual cumbersome work. After performing several of these manual changes repeatedly, Abigail felt a bit frustrated. She understood that a different metric should be optimized, which led her to develop an idea for an infrastructure change in the platform.

Abigail raised her idea in the next team sync. The concept she presented was complicated, with many details to follow, overwhelming in terms of scope, and the team dismissed the idea.

Abigail did not share her idea before this meeting with anyone on the team, and since she handled most of the amendment tickets to the platform, the other team members did not feel as strongly as she did about the current structure.

In the next section, I will present 6 tips that could have helped Abigail engage the team with her initiative and make it a reality.

The tips

1. Be open to feedback

Don’t do “that” look — you know the one I mean, the “but this is my genuinely great initiative” look. You thought about an idea. You think it’s really amazing, but a very important initial step is not to fall in love with it. Don’t take any feedback personally, and don’t get mad when criticism comes (because it will probably come).

In our use case, the untrusting and hesitant feedback that the team expressed when Abigail originally presented her idea should not be taken as an insult. Rather, it’s constructive and challenges the solution and how it was presented to the team.

2. Do the fieldwork

Since you’ve got a lot of convincing to do down the line, ensure you do a good job convincing yourself first!

Try these steps that you can perform in your head.

a. Define the motivation
b. Define the pain
c. Look for current tools trying to solve the pain
d. Think about the pros & cons
e. Look around — who else is facing the same problem? How do others tackle the issue?
f. Who else can use it?
g. Who can benefit from it?

3. Document it. Clearly

It might sound like a hassle, but hey! Think about whoever will need to read it after you’re done. In our use case, this might be where Abigail was not prepared enough to approach the team. The idea in her head was crystal clear, but it was too much for others to grasp in a non-methodological presentation.

a. Describe tip #2 (motivation, pain, current solutions…) in writing
b. Prepare a 1-slider (preferably, as it makes you think and write shorter) OR a short document. Make it:
i. Concrete and focused
ii. With a clear scope
iii. Easy for you to guide through
iv. Easy for others to review and follow through

4. Raise it in a meeting

I know you might not be a meeting type of person, but embrace your inner YouTube star and engage your audience via a F2F (or a Zoom2Zoom) meeting. That will surely work better than any Slack message or email.

a. (Prior to meeting) Recruit allies — leverage influence from experts / other groups/leaders. In our use case, Abigail could have set a dedicated 1-to-1 meeting with her team lead and or one of the senior developers in the team to guide them through the documentation. According to their questions and comments, she would understand what is not clear, which questions and concerns were not answered, etc.
b. Share the idea with your team
c. Share the idea with other teams
d. Engage the audience! They need to KNOW what you want from them. You need to make them THINK about what you suggested after the meeting so that it makes them DO something to push it.
e. Create shared ownership — in our use case, Abigail could have raised real-life issues the team confronted while working on the platform. She could also have asked other team members who experienced the same frustration when performing manual changes in the code to think about and challenge her idea the next time they update the pipeline.
f. Although I didn’t count this as one of the 6 tips, here are a few storytelling suggestions “on the house”:
i. Make your idea more or less 10 words, not more!
ii. The first 90 seconds are the most crucial in a meeting — start strong. It could be a personal story about the pain or an interesting fact.
iii. There are a ton of approaches on how to build your pitch. I’ll share some of the common ones:
1. Tarantino rule — start at the end solution, continue the process, and finish with the initial pain. No methodological order in the presentation.
2. Bridge model — use methodological order in the presentation: Pain<>Solution<>Impact
3. Think like your audience — build your pitch to answer the question each listener silently asks themselves: ‘What’s in it for me’?

5. Revisit your idea

If it didn’t work the first time, don’t despair. The backlog is dynamic! Create a periodic calendar notification for a sprint/month interval to revisit it and see if you can find a project or feature that could be relevant to promote the initiative.

6. Be the spokesperson for your idea

Be your idea, make sure people know your approach, make it your agenda, and push it whenever relevant. It could be a team retro or planning meeting, a company all hands, anywhere works.

Remember the allies from the 4th tip? Make sure to raise the topic again and promote it via the product manager, team lead, VP, etc.

Key takeaways

First, Don’t give up on your technical initiatives.

Next time you see a great opportunity, don’t hesitate to push it with the tools provided in this article. Who knows? It might work!

But before I finish, here’s one more note about pushing through new initiatives. At times, you will have done everything right, and for multiple reasons (that are probably not related to you), it just doesn’t work.

When that happens, think of all the things you gained during your journey: the appreciation of your peers and managers to push a new technical initiative, the practice of ideation and engaging others, meeting new people, business and technical insights on what drives your organization. Your effort was not for nothing, and next time, you’ll do it better, stronger, and win!