How Product, Engineering, and Design Can Work in Harmony
The best Product Managers act as a force multiplier for their team. They leverage the intellectual capital of the people around them to build products that create value for customers and the business.
However, often Product Managers, even the ones with the best intentions, operate in a way that disengages their team from the problem and the users leading to subpar products getting shipped. A part of it is due to the fuzziness that surrounds the Product role and how they should go about doing their job.
We can bucket the different activities that go into building a Product into broadly two sets. The ones that happen in the Problem Space and the ones that happen in Solution Space.
The Problem Space includes activities such as talking to customers and stakeholders, doing data deep dives, and reading up industry reports. What you are looking to achieve here is a clear insight into the user behavior and the problem statement. Product leads these activities, assesses the opportunity, and presents it to the team. The engineering and design team act as the QA and critiques the proposal to ensure that the Product Development Team pursues high impact opportunities with sufficient context.
Once the opportunity has been assessed and prioritized, the team moves to the Solution Space. The roles reverse here and now Design and Engineering can take the inputs and context shared by the Product Manager to design different approaches to solve the problem whereas the Product Manager wears the QA hat to evaluate different solutions and identifies the one that can achieve the objective with elegance.
This may seem utopian at first glance but there are ways to achieve it. You need Engineers and Designers who are not only great at building but also willing to understand the who, why, and what behind the product. You need Product Managers who are experts of their users and are motivated to help their team become experts too.
And when that happens, magic happens.
