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Engineer's guide to convincing your Product Manager to prioritize technical debt

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Re: Engineer's guide to convincing your Product Manager to prioritize technical debt

#21

Post by orev »

OutOfHere wrote: post #19
orev wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not usually the PM that has to deal with the unmanageable mess, it’s the engineer who’s still expected to deliver and gets it held against them when they can’t because of the mess.

That's only if the engineer doesn't have it previously documented in writing, on record, that any delays are due to the mess, and that the mess needs to be fixed the right way. It certainly should not come as a surprise. This is what I meant by "inform them".

In a perfect world, yes that would work. But in most places, that’s just a type of CYA and is seen as the engineer being difficult to work with. There’s never some kind of fact-finding committee that really wants to know the truth of who’s to blame based on an objective investigation. All the business side perceives is that “this person is making noise”, and they don’t want the noise, they just want the feature.

Re: Engineer's guide to convincing your Product Manager to prioritize technical debt

#23

Post by j45 »

rqtwteye wrote: post #4

I think best is not to ask the product manager for permission to address technical debt but to do it as a regular part of the job. And it's better to do this in an ongoing manner vs letting it pile up until nothing works anymore. Quantifying the improvements you get from addressing technical debt is a losing game. Most likely you will have to bullshit some numbers together.

Seeing it as risk is important. If they choose to overlook it, it's being clear that its not being held responsible for things going bad by doing what is asked (something different).

Re: Engineer's guide to convincing your Product Manager to prioritize technical debt

#24

Post by OutOfHere »

orev wrote: post #21
OutOfHere wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only if the engineer doesn't have it previously documented in writing, on record, that any delays are due to the mess, and that the mess needs to be fixed the right way. It certainly should not come as a surprise. This is what I meant by "inform them".

In a perfect world, yes that would work. But in most places, that’s just a type of CYA and is seen as the engineer being difficult to work with. There’s never some kind of fact-finding committee that really wants to know the truth of who’s to blame based on an objective investigation. All the business side perceives is that “this person is making noise”, and they don’t want the noise, they just want the feature.

> "they just"

Yes, there are such people who revel in keeping their ears closed, but I do my best to not work for them. I certainly don't want to contribute to putting an extra dollar in their pocket. About half the people are this way, but the other half are open to listening.

Re: Engineer's guide to convincing your Product Manager to prioritize technical debt

#25

Post by spoiler »

kalyantm wrote: post #11

Another way of looking at this is hiring Technical product managers, aka, folks who have moved to product management from software engineering. This automatically means you have engineers and product managers talking the same language from day one and you don't have to package tech debt as "value propositions". Being software engineers themselves, the PMs at our company usually have a good understanding of when to mo…

I've seen this be a hit and miss. My previous product manager has a technical background and moved into production management because he thought product managers suck, and wanted to be a force for good. He was one of the best product managers I worked with.

However, the very unfortunate truth is that _most_ engineers end up in product because they weren't good engineers. So they don't have a good internalised engineering culture as product managers either. My current one is by no means a horrendous one, but is definitely closer towards the bad end of the spectrum, and they moved to product out of management. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt for now, because they've just started the new job recently and maybe it's just friction from learning on the job.

Re: Engineer's guide to convincing your Product Manager to prioritize technical debt

#26

Post by ath3nd »

One should not be convincing a Product Owner to prioritize technical debt. It's an engineering decision, and the Product Owner has no say in engineering decisions, as they are not qualified to judge correctly.

It's like a surgeon convincing the hospital administrator to get some time to clean the scalpels.

Re: Engineer's guide to convincing your Product Manager to prioritize technical debt

#27

Post by dezgeg »

aeternum wrote: post #9

There is some real technical debt but there is often also imagined technical debt. To use an analogy, some engineers may think gothic architecture is ugly and should be replaced. That doesn't mean it is structurally unsound or that there is anything wrong with it.

Also not so coincidentally the 'fun' to fix debt is often prioritized over critical debt.

Case in point, the situation with our flaky/unstable test got so bad that quarter of them are now to set ignore any failures. Pretty much zero interest in fixing.

Meanwhile, the rewrite of a service that had no outstanding bugs (but was originally written by other team but handed to us) is still not done after 4 months...

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