Working with product managersThe relationship engineers have with product management is more dysfunctional than with any other part of the company. There’s no shared culture or language like there is with other engineers, and the rules of “who gets to tell who what to do” aren’t as clear-cut as they are with managers. Engineers don’t have a lot in common with legal, or design, or sales, but they also don’t need to interact much with those roles. In my experience, engineers are communicating with product managers almost every single day.

Against the “product mommy”

The worst version of the product/engineering relationship goes something like this:

Engineers are technically competent but are too autistic to be fully trusted. They need a kind-but-stern parental figure who knows how to communicate to other stakeholders in the organization (for instance, by being comfortable using the word “stakeholders”), and how to keep engineers from going off in the wrong direction.

This entire gross dynamic is neatly captured by the popular term “product mommy”1.<br>I really, really don’t like that term, or this entire dynamic in general. Almost none of my relationships with my product managers have been anything like this, though I have seen it at a distance.

Working well with product managers can be the difference between succeeding and failing at a company. Why is it so hard to maintain good relationships between engineering and product? What does a good relationship look like?

Why it’s so hard to build trust

Product managers and engineers have largely non-overlapping skillsets. Product managers don’t understand the technical work engineers do and aren’t equipped to talk about it: if an engineer gives a technical reason for something, product managers generally have to shrug and say “sure, I guess”. Likewise, engineers don’t have anything like the visibility into the organization that product managers do. Particularly in large organizations, it is the product manager who is the source of truth about who wants what and which features are important. When a product manager says that something is critical, engineers generally have to shrug and say “sure, I guess”.

This obviously requires a lot of trust. What’s a little less obvious is that this trust is continually broken by both sides . Every single product manager has been told thousands of times that technical task X is technically impossible or would be disastrous, only for that task to end up being done fairly smoothly and successfully. Every single engineer has been told thousands of times that requirement X is absolutely critical and worth going to enormous effort for, only for that requirement to be silently dropped or changed with no apology.

Of course this isn’t malicious. Engineers often give wrong estimates because estimation is impossible, and sometimes the dire consequences they warn about really do happen (they’re just handled behind the scenes, like engineers handle many other kinds of technical dysfunction). Product managers “change their minds” because what’s important in a large tech company does genuinely change hour-by-hour2, and even the best attempts to only filter the most reliable priorities through to the engineering team will sometimes go wrong.

Manipulation and lies

The consequence of this broken trust is that the relationship becomes very difficult to maintain. When you’re an engineer, and you explain something to your product manager, and you know they don’t believe you (despite having no ability themselves to judge the question), it can be incredibly frustrating. Likewise, when you’re a product manager, and you’re desperately trying to explain what we need to do to an engineer, and you know they’re internally shrugging their shoulders, it must be unbearable. Don’t they know this is critical to the company? You were just in a meeting with the leaders of the organization!

The natural tool for a mistrustful product manager is manipulation. I still remember a product manager who tried to extract a commitment from my team by asking us to go around and all say “I commit to getting this work done in two weeks”, after a conversation where we’d explained the risks that cause it to take longer. I suppose the idea was that we’d all work much harder, having taken a sacred oath? More subtle variants of this approach involve suggesting that you would be really disappointed if this work was delayed (in true “product mommy” style), or vaguely suggesting the possibility of some abstract reward (that the product manager is not empowered to deliver) if work gets done ahead of schedule.

The natural tool for a mistrustful engineer is lies. The most benign version of this is exaggerating estimates: for instance, the classic advice to double your estimate and add 20%. I’ve seen engineers claim that they’ve had to follow up on all sorts of largely-fake tasks (one common example is “reaching out to a neighbor team to confirm X”) in order to gain more time. In...