Product & Engineering Cross Functional Excellence

Recently Barbara Nelson, VP Engineering at InfluxData and I sat down to talk about the all-important role of the Product Management - Engineering relationship in Tech. With decades of experience between us, we have a shared point of view on this topic that resonated with the engaged audience at the Engineering Leadership Community 2023 conference in San Francisco.?

For the speed readers, below is a high-level summary of the conversation.?

For added meat on the conversation bones you can watch the fireside conversation here.

Roles & Leadership

• Product Management & Engineering have to work closely together but they also have to respect each other's roles.?
• Product Management has to be the group that has the casting vote on what is being built and Engineering needs to be the group that has the casting vote on how it is built.
• Valuable, Feasible, Usable and Viable, are the 4 pillars that a good Product Management team must always be pursuing for their products.
• It's really important for the Engineers to understand what the Product Manager and Product Management organization are bringing to the table.
• Engineers don’t often have the visibility to realize the extent that Product Managers work across the whole company to achieve their goals.
• In the absence of a Product Management team someone is setting the product direction and making the tradeoff decisions (i.e., doing the role of the Product Manager) whatever their title. Know who they are.
• Even with a technical founder setting the direction, you still need Product Management to define requirements in context.
• The past 5-10 years have seen the rise of the CPO to have a peer seat at the executive table, a trend that’s been largely driven by subscription and consumption business models.

Working Together

• A really great Product Management team can make an Engineering team look absolutely stellar but a poor Product Management team or relationship can make an Engineering team look pretty incompetent.
• There’s very often some kind of fundamental communication gap between Product Management and Engineering.
• The nature of the Product Management and Engineering relationship depends on many things, most notably, the junior/senior level talent on both sides, the complexity of the product, the target audience for the product (e.g. engineers or non-technical end users), the breadth of the product portfolio, the development methodology, the release cadences, the degree of technical debt and more.
• Product Management should expose Engineers to customers in ways that help them empathize with their needs.
• The Product Management - Engineering - Design relationship deserves an industry decision support framework (Reach out the Laura Fay if interested in this).

Day-to-Day Realities

Roadmaps

• Every release is an exercise in how to fit 20 pounds of stuff into a five-pound bag.
• Research reveals that the biggest influencers of the product roadmap are Sales and the Execs.
• Saying no to a new sales opportunity that threatens to take you away from your business direction often takes a lot of backbone on the Part of Product Management. It comes down to a couple of things, including;
• the state of the business, and?
• alignment across the senior team
• Full transparency makes it easy for Sales to see what is being traded off.
• Product Management needs to hold Sales accountable to acquire the committed revenue in the face of special roadmap capacity allocation. The industry is not strong on this practice.??

Tech Debt?

• There are both pros and cons to tech debt.
• Managing tech debt requires continual negotiation between Product Management and Engineering.
• It's important for Product Management and Engineering to understand and align on the trade-offs of addressing tech debt and feature debt.
• It’s never advisable to dedicate an entire release cycle to exclusively addressing tech debt.

Data

• The industry has moved from making decisions on opinions to one based on facts.?
• In this era, there’s little excuse for not having products fully instrumented to capture user behaviors.

AI

• Generative AI can both help and hinder Product Management teams.?
• AI is an area where Engineering can help the Product Management teams in understanding this complex technology and explore opportunities to enhance and monetize the offer portfolio.

Do you agree with the above points? Let us know your thoughts.