John Cutler’s Post

Aligning engineering and product management teams requires effective communication, collaboration, and a shared understanding of priorities. Here are steps to prioritize product features and functionalities without conflict: 1. **Establish Clear Goals**: Define the overarching goals and objectives of the product. Both teams should understand the purpose and target audience to prioritize features effectively. 2. **Collect Feedback**: Gather input from various stakeholders, including customers, sales teams, and market research, to understand user needs and market demands. 3. **Define Criteria**: Establish criteria for prioritization, such as customer impact, business value, technical feasibility, and strategic alignment. This ensures a systematic approach to decision-making. 4. **Collaborative Prioritization Sessions**: Conduct regular meetings where both engineering and product management teams collaborate to prioritize features. Encourage open discussions and consider diverse perspectives. 5. **Use Prioritization Frameworks**: Utilize frameworks like MoSCoW (Must-Have, Should-Have, Could-Have, Won't-Have), Kano Model, or Value vs. Effort matrix to evaluate and rank features objectively. 6. **Iterative Approach**: Prioritize features in iterations or sprints based on feedback, market changes, and business priorities. This allows for flexibility and adaptation as the product evolves. 7. **Continuous Communication**: Maintain transparent communication channels between engineering and product management teams. Regularly update each other on progress, challenges, and changes in priorities. 8. **Empowerment and Trust**: Empower teams to make decisions within their expertise and trust their judgment. Foster a culture of collaboration and mutual respect to resolve conflicts constructively. 9. **Data-Driven Decision Making**: Base decisions on data and metrics whenever possible. Analyze user analytics, A/B test results, and other quantitative data to validate assumptions and prioritize features accordingly. 10. **Regular Review and Adjustment**: Review priorities periodically to ensure alignment with changing market conditions, business goals, and customer needs. Adjust the roadmap as necessary to stay agile and competitive. By following these steps, engineering and product management teams can align their efforts, minimize conflicts, and work towards delivering valuable products that meet customer expectations. #projectmanagement #engineeringleadership #programmanagement #productmanagement #crossteamcollaboration #communication

As product managers, we strive to understand the bigger picture and how different parts of our product work together. This is where systems thinking comes into play, and mastering it can unlock a deeper understanding of your product as a whole. One key aspect of systems thinking is understanding your product's infrastructure. This doesn't require you to become an engineer, but having a clear grasp of its connections and interdependencies is crucial. Why is understanding the infrastructure important? Informed decision-making: It allows you to anticipate the impact of your product decisions on all connected systems, leading to more responsible and strategic choices. Improved problem-solving: By understanding the interdependencies between systems, you can identify potential bottlenecks and troubleshoot issues more efficiently. Effective communication: It fosters better collaboration with your engineering team, allowing you to communicate your vision and needs using a shared language. So, how can you unravel your product's infrastructure? Consult with your architectural team: Schedule regular discussions with the architects to gain a clear understanding of the various components, their connections, and potential dependencies. Ask insightful questions: Don't be afraid to ask questions, even if they seem basic. By understanding the "why" behind the architecture, you'll gain a deeper grasp of the system as a whole. Visualize the connections: Consider creating diagrams or flowcharts to visualize the connections and dependencies between different components. Remember, systems thinking is an ongoing journey. Ready to embark on your journey to mastering systems thinking? Head over to Product Girl (https://lnkd.in/eyUZDEcf) to explore resources and frameworks designed to help you unlock the power of this crucial skill. Share your experiences with understanding product infrastructure and its impact on your work in the comments below! What strategies have you found successful for collaborating with your architectural team? #productmanagement #systemsthinking #infrastructure #collaboration

Bringing product management and engineering teams into agreement on product scope requires effective communication, collaboration, and alignment of goals. Here's how companies can achieve this: 1. **Shared Vision**: Ensure that both product management and engineering teams understand and share the same vision for the product. Clearly communicate the product goals, objectives, and target market to foster alignment from the outset. 2. **Cross-Functional Collaboration**: Encourage regular collaboration and communication between product management and engineering teams throughout the product development lifecycle. Facilitate cross-functional meetings, workshops, and discussions to foster understanding and collaboration. 3. **Define Clear Requirements**: Work together to define clear and well-defined product requirements that align with customer needs, business objectives, and technical feasibility. Use techniques such as user stories, use cases, and acceptance criteria to document and communicate requirements effectively. 4. **Prioritization**: Collaboratively prioritize product features and functionalities based on their importance, value to customers, and impact on project goals. Use frameworks such as MoSCoW (Must have, Should have, Could have, Won't have) to prioritize requirements and ensure alignment between product management and engineering teams. 5. **Iterative Approach**: Embrace an iterative approach to product development, where requirements are continuously reviewed, refined, and adjusted based on feedback from stakeholders and market conditions. Encourage flexibility and adaptability to accommodate changes and evolving priorities throughout the development process. 6. **Feedback Loops**: Establish feedback loops between product management and engineering teams to facilitate ongoing communication and alignment. Regularly review progress, discuss challenges, and address any discrepancies in understanding or expectations. 7. **Empowerment and Trust**: Empower both product management and engineering teams to contribute their expertise and insights to the product development process. Foster a culture of trust, collaboration, and mutual respect to facilitate open communication and alignment of goals. 8. **Conflict Resolution**: Anticipate and address any conflicts or disagreements between product management and engineering teams promptly and constructively. Encourage open dialogue, active listening, and a focus on finding mutually beneficial solutions. By implementing these strategies, companies can foster alignment between product management and engineering teams, ensuring that they are in agreement on the product scope and working together effectively to deliver successful products.

Who should be blamed when a software product has way too many bugs? The engineers or the product manager? ... In my opinion, while it’s easy to blame the engineers, I believe product managers share equal responsibility. Why? Not just because they might not have done a thorough user acceptance testing, but when quality is consistently subpar, a bad team culture is often another root cause, and PMs play a significant role in shaping that culture. In a bad team culture: - Communication between the PM and engineers is usually broken. they work in mental and physical silos, often not co-located in the same room (in physical/hybrid work environments). - The PM doesn’t early involve the team in discovery, ideation, design reviews, and grooming iterations. Engineers only hear about the features they will implement weeks, if not days, before development starts and they are usually pushed to commit after just a brief discussion in the release/sprint planning meeting. The PM then leaves them to deal solely with the consequences later. - During implementation, it’s usually hard to reach the PM for clarifications. - Engineers are often harshly blamed for any delays, driving them to prefer low-quality hacks over asking for more time. In a good team culture: - The PM, designer, engineering lead, and engineers work closely together throughout the product discovery and delivery cycles. - They co-create and commit to the product vision, strategy, and OKRs as a team. - Engineers are highly encouraged to include technical infrastructure developments in the product roadmap to ensure long-term performance stability and improvements. - During implementation sprints, engineers are empowered to speak up about development hurdles, knowing the PM will be open to brainstorming alternatives. -They are also empowered to propose replanning the timelines anytime during the sprint to ensure delivering the best quality. The PM is flexible enough to accommodate new timelines and strong enough to renegotiate with business leaders if needed. - This environment makes engineers equally keen on product success, making them proactive in discovering and flagging anything that might cause bugs. - When things go wrong, engineers aren’t afraid to acknowledge mistakes and seek PM support to prioritize fixing them quickly. Having worked in both settings, I can tell you it's way easier to build and maintain a good team culture than to constantly deal on daily basis with issues resulting from a bad culture.

If you are interested to learn more about prioritization approaches in product, please continue reading... The Eisenhower Matrix is one of the various methods of prioritization in Product Management. The Eisenhower Matrix, also known as the Urgent-Important Matrix, is a method for prioritizing tasks based on their urgency and importance. It categorizes tasks into four quadrants: 1. Important and Urgent: These are tasks that require immediate attention and are crucial for achieving your goals. They should be addressed immediately. Examples in product management could include fixing critical bugs in a live product or dealing with a major customer issue that threatens the business. 2. Important but Not Urgent: These tasks contribute to long-term goals and success but don't require immediate action. They should be scheduled and given dedicated time for completion. Examples in product management might include long-term strategic planning, developing new features based on market research, or investing in team training and development. 3. Not Important but Urgent: These tasks are often distractions that demand immediate attention but don't contribute significantly to your goals. They should be minimized or delegated if possible. Examples could include responding to non-essential emails, attending unnecessary meetings, or dealing with minor issues that can be handled by someone else on the team. 4. Not Important and Not Urgent: These tasks are low-priority and should be avoided or minimized. They don't contribute to immediate goals or long-term success and can consume valuable time if not managed properly. Examples might include excessive social media browsing, minor administrative tasks that can be automated, or attending meetings that don't directly impact your work. In product management, using the Eisenhower Matrix can help prioritize tasks effectively, ensuring that valuable time and resources are allocated to activities that align with the overall product strategy and goals, while minimizing distractions and low-value activities. #productmanagement

Many organizations compartmentalize their product development pipeline, with product management, engineering, production, and marketing each operating in their own silos. This traditional structure often causes communication gaps, delays, and a disjointed final product. Crucial information can be lost or misunderstood during handoffs, stifling creativity and slowing down the entire process. Expecting these teams to collaborate effectively on their own often doesn't work, and assigning a Project Manager to oversee this complex orchestration isn’t enough. We need a dedicated person or team to drive a Product Development approach that spans silos. When teams work in isolation, misunderstandings and miscommunications easily arise. Each team may have its own priorities and timelines, leading to friction and inefficiency. By assigning a dedicated Product Development team or leader to break down these barriers and foster cross-functional collaboration, we create a culture of open communication and shared objectives. This shift ensures that everyone is on the same page and enhances the quality and cohesiveness of the final product. Imagine a conduit where information flows freely between product management, engineering, production, and marketing. With a Product Development approach, these teams work together from the outset, creating a unified strategy that leverages each function's strengths and expertise. This seamless integration facilitates better decision-making and allows for rapid iteration based on real-time feedback from all stakeholders. The result is a more cohesive and efficient project execution process. Spanning silos aligns all teams toward a common goal. When everyone works together from the beginning under the guidance of a Product Development leader or team, there’s a shared understanding of the project’s vision, objectives, and challenges. This alignment boosts morale and engagement, ensuring that each team member's efforts are directed toward achieving the same outcomes, leading to more cohesive and successful project execution. Cross-functional collaboration is at the heart of spanning silos. It encourages diverse perspectives and fosters an environment where innovative ideas can flourish. A dedicated Product Development approach systematically and effectively brings together the different disciplines involved in product development. This holistic approach not only enhances the product’s design and functionality but also ensures that it meets the market's needs more effectively. Spanning silos in product development requires more than improved communication—it demands a dedicated Product Development team or leader to drive integration, collaboration, and efficiency. By breaking down barriers, creating a unified conduit for information, aligning teams toward common goals, and fostering cross-functional collaboration, we can revolutionize the way we bring products to market.

"For me, this is similar to the core product prioritization problem: an infinite set of demands that each individual requestor considers to be extremely important/urgent. But for calendars, the scarce resource is time rather than development capacity." — Rich Mironov Read on for some tips on applying #productmanagement thinking to your calendar👇 https://lnkd.in/gaervKkf

Engineering Excellence vs. Business Impact While a team of 10+ engineers can produce remarkable technological feats, their business impact often falls short without the strategic direction of a Product Manager (PM). Why? 1️⃣ User-Centric Approach: The PM's Priority Surprisingly, not all executive ideas align with user interests. Some typical suggestions might include monetizing popular features or imitating competitors' latest innovations. Without a PM, these ideas, driven by charisma rather than user needs, could mislead engineering efforts. A PM serves as the user's advocate, ensuring that what gets built truly benefits the end-users. Great PMs know how to mitigate the risk of developing features that don't resonate with users. 2️⃣ Business Viability: Beyond Design and Gut Feel In design-centric cultures, a significant portion of product features may show little to no business impact. Effective A/B testing and data-driven approaches can significantly increase the success rate of new features. This underscores the importance of data-driven decision-making over gut feelings, an area where PMs excel in accountability. 3️⃣ Feasibility and Incremental Progress: PMs at the Helm While ambitious projects are exciting, they often lack practicality and immediate learning opportunities. PMs play a key role in breaking down these grand visions into achievable milestones, facilitating continuous learning and progress. PMs are the linchpin in harmonizing user needs, business goals, and team capabilities. Their role is not just about managing products but about leading teams towards meaningful, impactful innovation. #ProductManagement #EngineeringExcellence #BusinessStrategy #UserCentric #DataDriven

As someone who has led both engineering and product management teams, I've come to appreciate the collaborative nature of developing acceptance criteria. These criteria are a vital component in delivering successful software solutions to the market. They serve as a common language, ensuring that the development team and the product manager are on the same page about what needs to be achieved. Here are some characteristics of good acceptance criteria that product managers should provide software engineers: Characteristics of Good Acceptance Criteria 1. Clear and Unambiguous: The criteria should be easily understood by the product manager and the software engineers. There should be no room for misinterpretation. 2. Testable: Each criterion should be tested, either manually or automatically, to confirm whether it has been met. 3. Specific: Acceptance criteria should be specific and detailed, leaving no room for confusion. Vague or general statements should be avoided. This specificity is key as it ensures a clear understanding of what is expected, thereby avoiding any potential confusion. 4. Measurable: The criteria should include metrics or specific conditions that indicate success. 5. Relevant: The criteria should be directly related to the delivered functionality and aligned with the product's goals. The alignment between product managers and engineers is not just important, it's crucial. By providing clear, testable, specific, measurable, and relevant acceptance criteria, product managers are instrumental in fostering this alignment. This collaborative effort is key to delivering high-quality products that meet user needs and business goals.