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Working with Product Managers: Advice from PMs

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Working with Product Managers: Advice from PMs

Product managers and founders share tips for engineering managers and engineers to work better with them.

Gergely Orosz
Dec 16, 2021
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Working with Product Managers: Advice from PMs

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As a follow-up to this week’s post, 🔒 Working with Product Managers as an Engineering Manager or Engineer, I asked product managers for a few pieces of advice they’d give engineering managers (EMs) and engineers, to work better with product.

Below is a collection of several of the answers.

“If product is the Ying, engineering is the Yang”. No analogy is perfect, but I like this one.

Ebi Atawodi was my product counterpart for years at Uber. She is now director of product at Netflix and her advice is this:

  1. You are also “product”. There’s no “waiting for product” or “product said this or that”. Understand that you’re a partner in this setup. You own the product and outcomes just as much as the PM, the designer, and the data folks do.

  2. Care about the business outcomes and the customers. It isn’t just the job of the PM to be customer obsessed and to care about impact. What is the business context? Why are these business and customer problems important? What are the outcomes? What key metrics do our products impact, move, or improve? How are we tracking to those goals? How could we build a more magical experience for customers? All of engineering should be thinking about these questions.

  3. Develop a shared North Star vision. Build the vision together and be excited about it. The storyboards should include engineering North Stars as well. (Note from Gergely: building the shared North Star vision, writing it down and iterating on it, has been some of the best time I spent working with Ebi.)

  4. Make sure hiring, performance, and headcount discussions are collaborative. This also goes for staffing and scope changes. Don’t forget that this is a partnership.

Ross McNairn was my product manager when I worked at Skyscanner, in London. He is now chief product and engineering officer at business travel management platform TravelPerk. 

  1. There is no distinction between technical and product roadmaps. It’s a question of how directly and over what time frame something affects a user. If you refer to parts of the roadmap as “engineering only”, this creates a wall. For example, removing tech debt indirectly benefits users as it reduces bugs and increases development speed, so make this product impact clear as well. It’s lazy to draw a straight line between product and engineering as it creates unhelpful silos.

  2. Own the how. Don’t step back and wait for your PM to fill the operational space. Lean in! Run as much of the planning, estimation and project management process you can get your hands on. Partnerships all find their own equilibrium. The more you own the operation of building the feature, the more time your PM will spend on users and analysis. You’ll also be closer to the problem space. If you step off it leaves your engineers with less space to think about the “why”.

  3. Read and engage with the strategy. Even though the PM is ultimately responsible for putting the strategy in writing, you are a critical participant and stakeholder. Challenge your PM and the strategy, and build your own views. The more context you share and the more you are involved in the definition of strategy, the closer your alignment and the better your output.

Juan Pablo, formerly head of product at Albo reiterates the importance of “why”:

Twitter avatar for @UnMalNick
Juan Pablo @UnMalNick
@GergelyOrosz Please, ask *why* in everything I propose. As I do my best to give you context. For your context and way of thinking, you will have questions that maybe I don't have the answer and I should. And also, feedback is always valuable, not only on the products but also on my work.
4:23 PM ∙ Dec 1, 2021

He also shares:

“Communicate to make clear the debt: what is tech debt that the product has and how it impacts the team performance or the user experience.

In the past, I used this framework to frame technical debt.

It helped the team easily prioritize technical debt equal to the new product ideas.

 Lizzie Matusov, cofounder at Pathlight, makes the same point:

Twitter avatar for @lizziematusov
lizzie 💥 @lizziematusov
@GergelyOrosz ASK WHY! So often EMs/Engineers know *what* to do, but not *why* we do it. The better you empathize with the users needs, the better you can anticipate how the user actually interacts with your features (and write code to meet them where they are!)
5:46 PM ∙ Nov 26, 2021

 Dipti Desai, formerly product at Uber suggests leveraging your PM:

Twitter avatar for @diptidesaisf
Dipti Desai @diptidesaisf
@GergelyOrosz 1. Leverage PMs for their understanding of the customer and business objectives (and internal dynamics). Good PMs should have and share this information. It'll make you more strategic in how you perform. 2. Don't hesitate to propose ideas - good ideas can come from anywhere.
6:29 PM ∙ Dec 1, 2021

Shreef, product manager at Ankorstore and formerly at Booking.com talks about investing in each other’s success:

Twitter avatar for @shreef
Shreef 💉💉 @shreef
@GergelyOrosz I was on both sides. The EM and the PM. The best partnerships I had was when we invested in the success of each other. We had at least one mandatory 1:1 a week (even just to chat about personal life). We kept each other in the loop on most of everything with daily updates.
6:52 PM ∙ Dec 1, 2021

Krishna Nandakumar, product manager at Deliveroo shares three pieces of advice:

Twitter avatar for @ntkris
Krishna Nandakumar @ntkris
@GergelyOrosz 1. Request context on outcomes we want to achieve (if not shared). 2. Present a range of solutions: hacky to scalable. 3. Overcommunicate on delivery, blockers and execution.
7:47 PM ∙ Dec 1, 2021

Martijn Visser, product manager at Ververica, working on Apache Flink advises how to go about surfacing tech debt:

Twitter avatar for @MartijnVisser82
Martijn Visser @MartijnVisser82
@GergelyOrosz 1) Write down what is/can be the customer impact if we don't tackle certain technical debt or refactoring 2) Ask for insights/data if we want to do something customer facing
7:18 PM ∙ Dec 1, 2021

Kyle Johnson, VP Product at Plate IQ shares a simple way to ensure product and engineering truly understand one another:

Twitter avatar for @negcx
Kyle Johnson @negcx
@GergelyOrosz It’s a good idea for EMs to explain in their own words the needs of the customer to the PM and for the PM to explain in their own words the technical implementation to the EM.
12:31 AM ∙ Dec 2, 2021

Robert Stuttaford, CTO at Cognician emphasizes that transparency in decision-making is critical:

Twitter avatar for @RobStuttaford
Robert Stuttaford @RobStuttaford
@GergelyOrosz As a principle, keep the decisions you're making visible and discoverable. This is not easy, but when it's done well, all the other work is a lot easier.
4:22 PM ∙ Dec 1, 2021
18Likes1Retweet

Willem Spruijt was an engineer I worked with at Uber for four years. He is now the cofounder and CTO at Rise Calendar (I’m an investor). He highlights that product has much to balance:

‘Understand that product needs to balance more than just the engineering aspects. Product is often an intersection between business/sales, design, and engineering, all of which it needs to take all into account when prioritizing the direction of travel, or what to build. For example, deprioritizing a migration might not make sense to an engineer at all, because they are not aware of the sales impact when a new feature ships later.’

Finally, Deani Hansen, Engineering Manager at Productboard - previously at Slack for six years - summarizes the product / engineering relationship like this:

Twitter avatar for @DeaniHansen
Deani Hansen @DeaniHansen
@GergelyOrosz PMs is the Ying to the EMs Yang. The key is; communicate relentlessly, share, get feedback, expect pushbacks and building a multiplicative relationship around tactics, strategy, visions, and culture. Works best if you have similar ambitions
7:12 AM ∙ Dec 5, 2021

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Working with Product Managers: Advice from PMs

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