Working with product managers

The 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…