How PM Should Interact with The Engineering Team

In terms of the relationship between a product manager and the engineering team, the baseline is PM will never understand how the product is built better than engineers. Engineers are the creator of the product and they might know what’s best.

Communicate early about the upcoming product

If your engineering team heard about your idea the first during sprint planning, that means you are making a mistake. Technology is the side of product management that might be unpredictable for a PM. If you think some feature can be developed easily, you need to start talking to one of your engineering team members and you might be surprised by the complexity behind it.

You need to fix this!

We are as product managers, we mostly only see things on the surface. Oh, this should be a simple feature. Simple features might happen because there is a lot of heavy lifting happening behind them.

Understanding the difficulty level of a certain product being developed from an engineering perspective helps you to do a feasibility check. A feasibility check with the engineering team in the early phase of product discovery help you to answer these questions :

• Is my engineering team have all the skills to develop this feature?
• Is the complexity of the feature match the limitation of time that business stakeholders provide?
• How we should develop the product in a such way that we can validate the business value by not committing too much engineering effort?

By doing this early communication with the engineering team as product managers you will walk with certainty and boost confidence as you validate the value of the product you will develop in the future.

Communicate often, you will be surprised

As I told you that the engineering team is the creator of your product. They know better how it should be built. Even better they might come up with an even better solution than you are proposing.

This is something that happened to me, a lot.

One day, I was thinking to develop a feature. I do some ideation, what the customer journey will be, sketched a few screens of the app, I also thought what is the challenge from the technical side. I presented it to the CEO, CTO, and other PM or business stakeholders, and all works just fine and make sense from the business side point of view.

The next day, I shared it with the engineering manager and he shared what he think about it and give a lot of feedback. The feedback is super radical that I want to change the whole concept of the product I presented yesterday to the business stakeholder.

The engineering team has a unique perspective on the product, they can limit the product you want to build but they can also sharpen the product idea you have in your mind. Never underestimate the idea coming from the technical team, you might also want to challenge the team on what we can do to make the product even faster and more efficient.

The engineering team is not just the creator of the product, they are a significant idea generators for your product.

Challenge Them and Respect Their Credibility

What makes the engineering team love to work for a certain company or work with a certain product manager? The engineering team loves challenges, they love to work on cool stuff, and they hate boring kinds of stuff like another dashboard, another CRUD function, or another landing page.

You need to challenge and embrace them in what you will build in the future. If you have created something similar previously, you don’t want to do the same one in the future without any improvement. You need to challenge how it can be better than the previous one, you might want to try other tools, another concept, or a new way to test out or release the product.

They love new things, they love cool stuff.

When they are triggered to do something cool, give them a safe space to explore how it should be built so they can learn and improve their self professionally. At the same time, you are also challenging them to deliver impact in a timely manner. That’s how you challenge them but also respect their credibility.

I hope we as product managers, have more empathy for our fellow engineering team. We should understand them better, and have them beside us in every step of the product development process.

I love to hear more inclusive and collaborative ecosystem in your startup scene. Cheers!