When product and engineering teams are working well together, it can be the difference between building the wrong thing slowly and the right thing quickly.
But organizations often take this critical relationship for granted. Engineering and product managers are often paired up randomly, with little consideration for how to set up a productive partnership. At worst, the relationship can even turn antagonistic, with engineering managers (EMs) pushing for time to take on pressing technical debt, and product managers (PMs) insisting on a rapid clip of feature delivery instead, with no compromise in sight from either side.
Some of the hardest times in my career have been working with product managers who were anything but partners, putting me in the difficult position of shielding the engineering team from chaos and unrealistic expectations.
