One of the Best Relationships in Tech

A product manager (or more specifically, a product manager operating as a product owner, but that's another topic) has to interact with an engineering manager (EM) or tech lead. They could probably get away with avoiding each other - and often do.

If you were to look at this on a spectrum, the deeper the professional relationship, the better. And this has ontological reasons, not romantic ones. The product manager is deep in the world of people and business workflows. They are out in the fuzzy world of competitive analysis, customer discovery, user interviews (same thing), distilling workflows, trying to figure out the essence of a business problem or distilling various challenges into one or two core value propositions. (They are probably also playing support and scrum master, in many organizations. Is this fair? No, but that's another post).

This is as equally laborious as it is amazing.

Meanwhile, the engineering manager is generally grappling with various challenges around roadmap initiatives, engineer performance bottlenecks, plus at least a couple of nagging technical debt issues that occasionally bring down the platform at peak times, threatening his or her existence whenever someone decides to run a batch job off the side with API creds they shouldn't have.

The product manager lives and breathes the product. The engineering manager lives and breathes that which serves the product – the code, and probably the infrastructure it runs on (depending on organization size). These are very different worlds, but they must come into contact - often and at depth.

This is because the requirements distilled by product's lengthy analysis of the market and its users are indeed logical, but they meet the pavement, so to speak, at the moment of considering how to implement them (or retrofit them, into an existing product, already rife with its challenges - competing adjacent or parallel initiatives, technical debt, complexity, and team members that are there one minute and gone the next - for whatever reason.

As an organization, the synergy or compatibility between product and engineering will act as either a machine of efficiency or as a giant bottleneck.