- Now that you've figured out your product's requirements and come up with a validated design, it's time to actually build your product. And in this product development element of the product triangle, you're working with engineering.
- You'll work closely with engineering day-to-day to help oversee the product that's being built, making sure it meets the product requirements, making scope changes if key features are taking longer than expected to develop, prioritizing backlogs, and eliminating whatever obstacles may be presented.
- You'll want to do your best to establish a strong relationship with the engineering team because although a great relationship doesn't guarantee success, a bad relationship may guarantee failure.
- While this phase can be a lot of fun as a product comes to life, it can be very hard for product managers for two reasons:
+ The first is that if you started your career as an engineer, you might unintentionally frustrate the engineering team or imply you know better than they do.
+ Alternatively, if you don't have an engineering background, you might not understand how engineers work or how to work with them, causing them to not respect you.
- Fortunately, these problems are manageable. We'll start by looking at some of the soft skills, the interpersonal relationship skills, that'll help you work with engineering. Then we'll look at some common ways that the engineering team works and see how you as a product manger can fit into those workflows.
