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Engineering vs Product — Turning Tension Into Triumph

Why it’s ok for engineering and product to fight

Jack Moore
The Startup
4 min readSep 13, 2020

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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…

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Published in The Startup

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Jack Moore
Jack Moore

Written by Jack Moore

A product person looking to figure out all the ways software can improve peoples’ lives

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