12/26/2024

Moving beyond traditional engineering and product silos to build lasting, effective partnerships that drive innovation

Written by: Jonathan Haas

“This isn’t what we asked for.”

Five words that strike dread into every engineering team. Five words that signal a fundamental breakdown in the engineering-product relationship. I’ve heard them countless times across dozens of organizations, and they always point to the same root cause: treating engineering and product as separate entities rather than unified partners.

Let me paint you a picture of what usually happens:

Product managers spend weeks gathering requirements, conducting user interviews, and crafting the perfect specification document. They hand it off to engineering with pride, confident they’ve thought of everything. Engineering teams review it, estimate it, build it… and somehow, the result still misses the mark.

Sound familiar?

The Root of the Problem

The issue isn’t bad product managers or incompetent engineers. The problem is the “handoff” itself. When we treat product development as a relay race where the baton passes from product to engineering, we’re setting ourselves up for failure.

Here’s what that process actually looks like in practice:

PM's Mental Model:
Business Need → Research → Requirements → Perfect Specification

Engineer's Mental Model:
Technical Constraints → Implementation Options → Architecture → Code

Reality:
Business Need ↔ Technical Constraints ↔ Research ↔ Architecture ↔ Requirements

Notice the difference? Real product development isn’t linear. It’s a complex web of interdependencies that requires constant collaboration.

Breaking Down Walls by Breaking Bread

The best product-engineering partnership I ever witnessed started with lunch. Not a formal meeting, not a process overhaul - just weekly lunches where engineers and PMs talked about anything except their current projects. These informal connections laid the groundwork for real collaboration.

When they did discuss work, conversations changed from:

“We need feature X by date Y”

to:

“Users are struggling with Z. What could we build to help them?”

This subtle shift transformed their entire dynamic. Engineers became problem solvers rather than code producers. PMs became partners rather than taskmasters.

What True Partnership Looks Like

I recently chatted with a startup where the engineering lead joined every user interview. Not just the technical ones - all of them. Initially, it seemed like a waste of engineering time. But the insights gained from direct user contact led to technical innovations that would never have emerged from a traditional specification.

One example: They were planning to build a complex reporting system based on user requests for “better analytics.” But because the engineering lead had heard users describe their actual problems firsthand, they realized a simple automated email with three key metrics would solve 80% of the use cases. The result? They shipped a solution in days instead of months, and users loved it.

The Partnership Playbook

Want to transform your own engineering-product relationship? Start here:

Create Overlap Zones

• Product attends engineering design reviews
• Engineering joins user research sessions
• Shared team spaces (virtual or physical)
• Joint problem-solving sessions before solution definition

Build Shared Understanding

• Engineers explain technical constraints through demos, not documents
• PMs share user insights through stories, not specifications
• Regular tech-product syncs focused on possibilities, not just status

Measure What Matters

• Track outcomes, not output
• Celebrate joint wins
• Recognize and reward collaboration

Signs You’re Doing It Right

You know you’ve achieved true partnership when:

• Engineers proactively suggest product improvements based on technical opportunities
• PMs ask for technical input before, not after, making product decisions
• Both teams feel comfortable pushing back on each other’s assumptions
• Solutions emerge from collaboration rather than compromise

The Path Forward

Building strong engineering-product partnerships isn’t easy. It requires trust, time, and often a complete rethinking of how we work together. But the payoff - better products, happier teams, and faster innovation - makes it worth the effort.

Start small. Pick one project, one feature, or even just one regular meeting where you’ll try a more collaborative approach. Watch what happens when you bring engineers and PMs together early and often. Listen for the quality of the conversations. Notice how solutions evolve when both technical and product perspectives shape them from the start.

Because at the end of the day, users don’t care about our internal divisions. They care about products that solve their problems elegantly and effectively. And that only happens when engineering and product work as true partners, not just collaborators.

The wall between engineering and product isn’t real. We built it ourselves, and we can tear it down together.