How Product Managers and Engineers Work Together Best

How to build trust quickly with your engineering team as a PM

This article is featured in the Skiplevel newsletter where I answer questions directly from the tech community about leveling up their technical skills and communicating with engineers.

Q: How do I build trust quickly as a product manager in an engineering-led organization (i.e. Engineering Directors have the final say)? — Asked by a Product Manager @ Activision

Hey PM @ Activision,

The quickest way to build trust in an engineering-led org is to show the engineering team that you’re both able and willing to empathize with, learn about and support their work. There’s a lot that goes into these that I’ll discuss in this article.

First, you should understand the difference in motivations behind product-led teams and engineering-led teams. While product-led teams make decisions based on product vision and how the product meets a set of customer and business objectives, engineering-led orgs place the decision-making emphasis on innovation and execution. This means solving technical problems with the least effort in the most scalable way. Your engineering manager is primarily concerned about the strength of the engineering team, solving technical challenges, and what is possible with technology.

With that in mind, do the following to build trust as a PM in an engineering-led org:

1. Empathize with the engineering experience, concerns, and considerations
2. Be curious and willing to learn technical skills
3. Ask how you can support their work

Build trust through empathy

Empathy can be a “crunchy” adjective that lacks specificity. We throw the word around often but less often talk about the how. What does empathizing with engineering actually look like?

While you’re not expected to know how to code, it’s important for the engineering team to feel you know what you’re talking about with at least the fundamentals in order to build trust.

Much more goes into creating software than just coding. To truly empathize with engineers is to possess an understanding of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) a.k.a the process of developing software and have some idea of what it takes to build reliable and maintainable software. Engineers must consider data design, architectural, and infrastructure decisions. To create maintainable and bug-free software, engineers must also consider and implement testing features, logging, alerting, performance monitoring, and more. There’s also decision making behind how to release software: deployment pipelines, staging environments, and rollback measures. These are just a few of the complexities that engineers must juggle while balancing technical trade-offs like scalability, fault tolerance, security, maintainability, ease-to-implementation, time-to-implement, and more.

You’ll need to have a moderate breadth of knowledge about all the above topics (and more) in order to develop your “engineering mindset”.

Possessing this level of empathy will help you engage with the engineering team that integrates the product <> engineering disciplines in a meaningful way.

Be curious and open to learning

The journey of learning technical skills and building a strong technical foundation is anything but quick. It takes time and lots of practice to build a strong level of empathy for engineering concerns and considerations.

But you don’t need to be a technical expert off the bat to gain engineering’s trust.

To build trust quickly with engineers, simply show interest and be willing to improve your technical skills and knowledge through self-learning and asking questions.

Being curious and openness to learning is an attractive trait period. When engineers see a product manager putting effort into learning technology, what they see is:

• Someone willing to understand and appreciate the complexity of their work
• A team player that’s willing to contribute to the ultimate goal of shipping awesome software

The majority of people want to help, so even if you’re struggling, the engineers on the team will be patient in teaching and explaining and this relationships inherently builds trust.

Ask how you can support their work

One of the easiest and most effective ways to gain the trust of engineers is by doing the following:

At the end of the every engineering meeting and discussion, ask “What is ONE thing that I can do that will make your job easier?”.

This simple addition shows you’re willing and ready to support them by taking superfluous tasks off their plate so they can spend more time on building.

Here are a few examples of tasks you can take off your engineer’s plates to enable them to do their best work:

• Take over responding to trivial user tickets that do not required a dev’s expertise to respond to. These tickets unnecessarily take up an engineer’s time and effort to respond to. These sorts of tasks can be handled by product managers instead to lighten the dev team’s load.
• Where possible, take ownership of documentation. Documentation is a necessary step in the SDLC. As the PM, take ownership of documenting the goals, user flows, and business side of the product before and during the build process. If you’re technical enough, also help with documenting APIs and how-to guides for how to use the product. This process will also help you better understand the product from a technical perspective while also improving your technical skills.
• Come up with / take over processes. Processes are necessary and important, but not the bread and butter of engineers. Wherever you can, offer to come up with and/or clarify team processes, whether it’s internal team processes, inter-team processes, or external (customer-facing) processes.

Positive feedback is feedback too!

We often think of feedback as “critical feedback”, but positive feedback is just as important! Team cohesive and effective teamwork ultimately comes from a place of positivity and a sense of forward/upward momentum. It’s difficult to have these when just focusing on critical feedback. You want to know what you’re doing right along with ways you can improve. So as much as possible, ask for positive feedback like “What did you like about [x] that you’d like to see me continue doing?” and “What was your favorite part about [x]?”

If you want to level up your technical skills and your ability to communicate and collaborate with engineers, enroll in the Skiplevel program. The Skiplevel program is a comprehensive, on-demand course + community that helps you become more technical without learning how to code.