Product & Engineering — One Big Happy Family

“How do you get engineering teams excited about your product?”

I’ve found this to be an increasingly popular question posed to Product Management candidates, and I like it.

I break this down into four categories; Autonomy, Innovation, Invitation, and Information.

Autonomy

Simply stated, Product Management != Project Management. Your responsibility as a Product Manager is to ensure that what is being built is delivering value either to your customer, or your company in some way, and is aligned with your company’s strategic vision. It is not up to you to manage the Engineering team’s deliverables/timelines/etc. They [should] have their own systems in place for accountability.

Innovation

Any software engineer worth their salt in the modern digital age is looking for cool and new ways to flex technology to solve complex problems. Tech is changing so fast, it’s next to impossible to keep up on 100%. Providing opportunities to innovate in order to solve a business or customer problem helps to keep the company technically relevant. Not only does this also result in growth for the engineers, but it frequently unlocks previously unthought of potential of where your product(s) may be able to grow next!

Invitation

Invite Engineering early on into customer and strategic discussions. They are the experts on what is currently feasible (as well as what tech could be brought into make something new feasible) and can probably offer some unique insights into overall strategy.

Information

Always keep Engineering (along with all other groups) informed on strategy, roadmaps, etc. Your job is to effectively communicate customer needs and the business strategy/priority so that Engineering has time to plan accordingly. Context switching is the bane of a software engineer, so staying ahead of the game with up-to-date roadmaps allows for less interruptions, and more efficient solutions/deliverables.

What are your thoughts to the question “How do you get engineering teams excited about your product”? How would you answer?