Six ways to improve the engineering product manager dynamic

The relationship between the product managers and engineering is one that must be nurtured constantly. This relationship dynamic can sometimes face challenges when teams overlook the importance of understanding each other’s needs. Requirements and optimal modes of collaboration. Issues will always arise in this relationship such as developers perceiving that the product managers are lacking technical acumen, or product managers believing the developers are not grasping real-world customer concerns. Managing this relationship can be challenging but not impossible and at its core lies the issue of trust between the two groups. For a healthy partnership to grow, product managers need to trust their team’s ability to deliver the right technical solutions, while engineering must also trust that their product managers are providing the necessary context to the impacting product challenges or new features. To help you develop this relationship, here are five ways you can begin building a foundation of trust:

Clarify the problem

Whether your company uses Azure DevOps, Smartsheet, Notion, maybe even Excel, sometimes these tools are not enough to thoroughly convey the problem and the tasks needed. Before you even begin to enter the tasks into these tools, you need to ensure the problem is well understood. Write down your thoughts on the problem and try to condense it to one page if you can. In this document, it includes things like:

• The business goal the customer wants target
• The challenge of what is keeping them from attaining the goal
• How your product or new feature can help them meet that goal

Keep these details brief yet thorough and share them with your team and let them read through, digest, and even comment on the problem so that they can ask clarifying questions and provide feedback. Once you’ve gotten some feedback, set up a quick call to make sure all their questions are addressed, and they understand what they are trying to solve for.

Get feedback from multiple sources

Another way to boost your credibility by showing that you really understand the customer goal, is to get feedback on the potential solution from customers across different sectors. Whether that be size, industry or customer base, showing your team you’ve done some work to show that this isn’t something they’d have to redesign later for other customers will demonstrate that you have a holistic view of the proposal. While they can take lots of time to talk to customers individually, surveys are also a good option if time is limited. An even better scenario would be to invite a few members of the engineering team to a few of the customer calls so they can hear the feedback directly and ask questions. Many engineers do not have the opportunity to talk to customers on a regular basis, inviting them along allows them to feel more connected to customers and prompts them to explore better solutions.

Mockups

Everyone interprets information differently, even if we are all reading the same message. Visual aids can go a long way in trying to convey the problem or proposed solution. Mockups are a powerful tool that you can use to help facilitate communication, collaboration, and effective development within a product team. They enable product managers to translate their ideas into tangible visuals, gather feedback, and guide the development process toward creating successful products. By mocking up what you expect the end results to look like, you are greatly helping your team navigate with less ambiguity and allows them to tell you early on what is technically feasible or not. Mockups can be a great tool for your team to understand what they need to build, but it can also be shown to your customers to help provide clarity on what the general direction of the design is. While mockups can take a lot of time to create, you don’t need to be a Figma expert, using PowerPoint shapes, Visio, or even a whiteboard app can help you show rough sketches of what you’re thinking about and can enable better collaboration with your team. Pairing mockups with your one-page document would be the best of both worlds.

Measure success

To know where you want to go tomorrow, it’s important to know where you are today. Putting those measures in place to understand your current position allows you to gauge how your feature helps over time as more customers adopt the new functionality, and it makes it easier to demonstrate the impact. The best way to determine if something is successful is to be able to measure it. Every project or feature should have a clear goal, and each goal should be measurable. Whether it can be achieved quantitatively through metrics (such as increased product usage or fewer incidents) or qualitatively through customer feedback (like quotes and surveys), the outcome should be outlined before you begin. With the end goal in mind, this helps your team establish the right telemetry and metrics from the start.

Share the joy

Never miss a moment to highlight your team. Lurking through any tech forum, it’s clear a common sentiment shared by engineering is that product managers often receive all the credit for projects and features when they are successful. This belief and dynamic are another place where distrust can grow in the working relationship. To help limit these occurrences and beliefs, it’s critical that you include the team in the results you have when you are sharing it with management. A quick mention of the team members that worked on the project highlights that you’re a team player and able to provide credit and your team will trust that you have their best interest at heart and that you understand and appreciate their efforts. Being proactive with praise helps your team learn to trust that even if they are not in the room, that you are giving praise and shows that you genuinely care about their success and contributions.

Leave room for feedback

Every project has things that can be improved upon. An important thing to do is to make sure that your team is heard after the project is released or completed. Hosting a post-project discussion with your team to see what could have been done better, what could be improved allows you to refine your product manager’s approach to the team and how they work best and gives you great insight into what works well and things you can tweak for future projects. If you are following the Scrum process, you may have retrospective meetings for sprints. Unless your team only worked on this feature for the sprint, then another meeting should be used to provide feedback explicitly about the project which typically may spread over multiple sprints. More meetings are not something that everyone will be thrilled about so this should be used on larger or impactful features that take multiple sprints to complete.

It’s important to use your discretion when evaluating each feature, some things are simple and straight forward and may not need all of the methods described above, whereas others may require even further in-depth discussions. As a product manager, you should see yourself and engineering as one team. We need each other, our features and successes are deeply tied together. Changing your perspective to being a unit instead of us versus them will greatly improve your relationship with your team. Be clear with the feature goals and objects, consistently highlight and show appreciation to the team’s role in successes, and listening to their feedback you can nurture a culture of collaboration and shared accomplishments built on trust.

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