Product-Engineering Alignment

Improving product-engineering alignment - How do you know when you've got it right?

One of the areas I love to talk to clients about is the alignment between product and engineering teams. I love talking about it because getting it right makes a massive difference to the culture in both teams and the broader company. For me, this is all about building the right thing, in the right way, at the right time. So what do I mean by that?

Building the Right Thing

This is where your product team comes in. You want to solve a real problem that customers care about. It's not enough to have a great product that "sells itself." Experimentation and testing ideas are key to tapping into a real need that people want to spend money on.

How you know it's working

You know you're getting this part right if the product team is talking to customers and experimenting with new features and workflows. They will have robust analytics that tell them whether a feature is performing as expected and will remove or change features that don't perform.

The engineering team will actively contribute, listening to customer interviews, suggesting experiments and refining analytics to get better data. There's no grumbling about removing experimental features; no one considers it wasted effort if an experiment doesn't work.

Building the Thing Right

This is where your engineering team comes in. There are always trade-offs in tech, and your engineering team needs to be embedded in the company goals and vision to make the best decisions about what to prioritise in those trade-offs.

How you know it's working

You know you're doing this right if your engineers present the product team with business reasons for technical work, such as infrastructure improvements and refactoring. In addition, engineers regularly propose alternative implementations that meet company and product goals and save time and effort.

On the product side, the backlog balances feature work and technical improvements. The team understands the importance of both and can discuss why and when the technical improvements will occur.

Right Time

The alignment really shows in doing all this at the "Right Time." Closely aligned teams understand when something needs to be fast rather than polished. They know when prioritising infrastructure work or upgrades gives them a commercial advantage over new features.

How you know it's working

Pushing out features that aren't quite so polished happens, but the work to finish it isn't forgotten to languish on a backlog somewhere. Instead, there's an explicit agreement from both product and engineering about the remedial work and when and under what circumstances it gets done.

Equally, sometimes, features are delivered a little late because both sides agree that the quality matters for this use case, so everyone takes the time to get it right.

Wrapping it Up

None of this is easy. It takes a diverse team that respects each other enough to challenge information and make the best decisions. Information also needs to flow both up and down the organisation so that it is present where decisions are being made.

Product-Engineering team alignment can be a complicated problem to solve, but when it's done right, the results are impressive - happier teams, happier customers and more successful products 😊

If you're a startup or scaleup and need technical leadership and strategy support, or are looking to improve your team alignment, I offer a technical advisory service, fractional CTO, and mentoring. If interested, you can book a free initial chat  to discuss your situation and needs.