A product leader's guide to getting the best from your engineers.

Few organizations get the best from their engineering teams because they don't engage with them as equal partners in the design and innovation process. They treat them as just "delivery" or "production."

Human Capital losses

Treating engineers as "delivery" is a human capital management failure on par with treating your product managers as just "stakeholder management" or "requirements management". As product leaders, we understand the incredible impact a product manager can make through great market research, customer discovery & insights, and leading ideation with design thinking principles. What I have realized is many executives and product leaders let the "left-brain" stereotypes of engineers undermine their understanding of how to engage with engineers properly. This hinders many leaders from understanding how to hire great engineering leaders and engineers to support great innovation, too.

I've been a software developer since I was 12, starting with Applesoft BASIC, moving to Digital BASIC, and then on to modern languages like J2EE, Dotnet, and JavaScript frameworks. Having said that, my first love and passion have always been on the strategy and innovation side, as I was pretty much born with an entrepreneurial bent.

My career in product management started with highly technical products like massively parallel distributed analytics, networking and cybersecurity, and fintech, where the products were most often differentiated by the quality of the engineering and science behind them. Then, I moved to knowledge worker products where the "secret sauce" was getting more of the customer's Job-to-be-Done done, with a great experience, in the same product or platform. However, I was shocked to see how much less engagement there was with the engineers.

I understand that not all products require as much advanced science from engineering, but so many SaaS companies either offshore engineering, or hire very junior developers onshore, with no thought to creating empowered product team cultures.

They treat engineers as order takers, and the PMs often lack the technical skills or desire to engage fully with the engineers in ideation and innovation. This results in under-engaged engineers and products that work, but don't differentiate in the market or create raving fans among their customer base.

Contrasts

The contrast between the workflow-based product companies and the high-tech product companies I've worked for is that in the high-tech companies, engineering, and invention were a massive competitive differentiator that led to 80%+ market share across multiple product lines. Those high-tech companies must have empowered engineering teams, or they won't survive in their technology evolution-driven markets.

How do we make engineering a superpower in a product company?

We've all read Marty Cagan's books on empowered product teams, but what is needed to get engineers to engage in that model? How many PMs know how to answer that?

First, create the right culture.

Legendary Silicon Valley coach Bill Campbell, and former CEO at Intuit, once had a product leader come into a meeting with engineering and tell them what to build - down to UI widgets and logic. After the meeting, Bill took him aside and told him he would fire him if he ever did that again. Bill understood what every great product leader needs to understand - bring engineering customer outcomes to solve and let them advise on what is possible with technology.

This is the crux of creating empowered product teams. You need to engage engineers earlier in the idea evaluation process to discuss how the customer outcome might be solved with technology. Shapeup is a great method for this as it fosters fast (5-15 minute) conversations between product and engineering with intentionally high-level constructs such as fat-marker-level UI sketches and breadboard-level business logic sketches to ideate on where and how the customer outcome might be delivered within the product. Concrete enough to score the idea with I.C.E. or another prioritization score that factors in Ease, while determining early in the idea evaluation process if the idea is feasible within the appetite for the idea. Appetite is a key concept of Shapeup that is missing from most companies' PLM/SDLC process - or is considered so much later that PM/UX resources have been wasted on grooming ideas that are too expensive or infeasible - at this time.

Second, you need to hire the right kind of engineering leaders and engineers.

Every high-performance human operates within their strongest natural talents and has a healthy, competence-based, self-esteem. A self-image based on who they are and what they have accomplished. Engineers nearly always come from the spectrum of humanity with strong left-brain dominant talents for reasoning, logic, and scientific comprehension. However, like any of us, they can rely too strongly on their talents at the expense of other areas needed to be part of a great team. Most of us have met these people, Bill Campbell called them aberrant geniuses. He also coached leaders to embrace them and coach them to a place where they were competent in the "plays well with others" skills - or let them go. They are only a net positive to the team when their genius is not outweighed by the impact of their aberrant behaviors.

Startups can be extremely lucky to hire an aberrant genius early and they can have a huge impact on getting the product started in the market. Unfortunately, those companies often mistakenly overpromote them as the engineering team grows. This results in conflicts when you need to scale, pivot, or when you need to mature your innovation practice. Ideally, you hire balanced engineering leaders who are both technically talented and able to embrace collaboration within the empowered product team model. Only then can you avoid the engineering cultural anti-patterns such as the "just let me code" hermit engineer, the "staff engineer bottleneck", knowledge silos, etc.

Third, create a continuous pipeline of market knowledge to engineering.

Share market research, customer insights and discovery, and UX research, with engineering during shaping/ideation to build engineering knowledge of the market needs.

All upstream work from engineering should not be activities done in silos, with artifacts thrown over the wall to the next team. Through proper knowledge management and PLM processes, every insight and artifact - jobs-theory-based quantitative market research, CX/CS insights, customer interviews, and UX research - should be captured and mapped to ideas before ideation with engineering. Leveraging all upstream work to enrich the context and depth of understanding of what your market is trying to do is the key to successful innovation. Disciplined and mature processes and tooling empower the product manager to provide the engineer with a rich and focused context for the customer’s need and desired outcomes at the idea, sprint, release, and long-term roadmap context levels. This is a massive multiplier for engineers as it informs every design decision and ensures consideration of the needs of the customer now and further along the roadmap evolution.

This empowers the entire product team, from the PMs to QA at every stage. It improves early-stage idea shaping, sprint-level solution ideation, and major architectural decisions with the appropriate context of the customer's needs. Creating this level of engagement with the engineers creates shared understanding instead of focusing countless hours trying to perfect the form and content of your requirements documents. A document will never be as good as a genuine shared understanding and context across the product team.

In summary.

You can accelerate your pace of innovation, improve quality, and create engaged and fulfilled engineering teams who are true partners to product management because they understand why they are building what they are building. Only then can your engineers bring their best and most creative innovative ideas to the table as part of an empowered product team.

Additional thoughts:

• Great UX is no substitute for great capabilities that deliver real customer outcomes in ways the customer didn't even know technology could deliver.
• I've seen 4X productivity acceleration and >70% reduction in defects within engineering teams where we have created empowered product team culture and processes. The engineers become first-class participants in the empowered product team, not just in ideation and solution delivery. They gain JIT access to market knowledge and customer insights to help them understand how their work delivers a tangible, high-value, customer outcome - and great engineers want that clarity of purpose and meaning in their work.