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Engineering vs Product — Turning Tension Into Triumph
Why it’s ok for engineering and product to fight
Let me know if this has happened to you before:
Engineer: I’m not sure we’re going to be able to get done features A, B, and C by the deadline you gave us.
Product Manager: What if we [built it differently, pushed through the weekend, deprioritized that other thing you’re working on]?
Engineer: Feature A turned out to be more complicated than we thought due to an unforseen dependency on that system we built in a programming langauge that nobody knows. Anything we could build that quickly will break in a month, we can’t do that. What if we build A & B now, and came back for C.
Product Manager: It’ll hurt, but I suppose that’s ok.
Engineering and product butt heads quite regularly, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Anytime two parties are incentivized towards opposing goals, there’s likely to be tension. Recognizing and maintaining these healthy tensions are key to driving the complex mechanism of a company forward.
Why Engineering/ Product Tension Exists
One of the great truths of product is the Four Big Risks — Feasibility, Usability…