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Ask HN: As a Product Manager, what can I do to make my engineers' lives easier?

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Re: Ask HN: As a Product Manager, what can I do to make my engineers' lives easier?

#11
post #8
post #7

Best thing you can do is to bring customer problems to engineers & come up with solutions together. Far too many PMs create detailed spec documents (solutions) on their own and throw it over the wall to engineers. Benefits of this approach, 1. Engineers get to know more about the customers & their pain points first hand. 2. Engineers are bought into the solution as they co-created it. 3. You usually come up with bett…

Great points! What would you do in situations where your engineers aren't all that interested in customer conversations? In the past, I've tried to bring in our engineers to user interview/feedback sessions or customer meetings, but most of them didn't seem that interested in coming again.

In that case, I would frame the conversation as a problem solving session. You can do the legwork of customer inputs, cross team talk, management buy-in etc. And once you zero in on the problem (and have it prioritised) just talk to engineer and together brainstorm the ways to solve it.

Re: Ask HN: As a Product Manager, what can I do to make my engineers' lives easier?

#12
post #5

The best PMs are those who don't act like managers. Engineers don't report to Product nor Project Managers. Unfortunately, many PMs act like they are real managers and bully engineers around. This only leads to confusion and bad culture. Senior devs don't take orders from PMs but junior devs usually end up confused and create more issues. In my 10 years of experience as software engineer, a PM has never forced me or…

110% this. My worst professional experiences have all revolved around product people pushing aggressive deadlines. The best shops I've worked at have had product people who are subservient to technology teams. Product exists so that developers can focus on code and implementation and not have to play politics and attend endless meetings.

How do you deal with an issue where engineering provides estimates but does not deliver even on their worst case? I agree PM/PO should never push. What if engineering is the issue?
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