The question you should never EVER ask your engineers!
Put your learn mode in overdrive and boost creativity by asking *stupid* questions
What do product managers want to ask at engineering meetings but are too afraid to for fear of looking stupid?
Are you new in your PM position?
You might wonder how you’re going to handle the meetings with engineering without showing your lack of technical understanding and losing “cred” with the engineers.
You might even resort to the mantra of:
Silence is golden, speech is silver
But my personal experience and some surveys of seasoned PMs show that the there is no question you should never ask — on the contrary…
When I started out as a PM, I had weekly meetings with hardware, mechanical and software development.
The latter being the area where I started with close to zero expertise.
These meetings were tough as I tried to understand all discussions of full stack development, continuous testing and new programming conventions. Week for week I would leave the meeting none the wiser.
That changed abruptly when, at every agenda point, I confessed to understand almost nothing technical and sought to grasp what they were doing and why.
My “stupid” questions helped me personally to learn an incredible amount in an area that used to be uncharted territory for me.
Also, the discussions of experts trying to put their arguments in simple terms, fostered common understanding between them.
Stupid questions are the most valuable
After I had a lot of success promoting my ignorance and openly asking “stupid questions” as part of my learning, I discovered three benefits of stupid questions.
They match very nicely with my experiences.
- “Stupid questions” help you learn much quicker
- “Stupid questions” uncover the implicit things and unknowns
- “Stupid questions” invite to reframe a problem and simplify the solution
Practice proven guide to “stupid questions”
Engineers tend to appreciate your effort when you want to learn what makes their solution tick. Just be sure to do your homework before and know the information that is available.
Three approaches proven to help in engineering meetings
- Aggressive ignorance: “I just want to say I have no idea of the technical details — maybe you could help me understand ___”
- Simplify and reframe: “so, what I got from that is that ___ does ___ and ___ can be used to ___”
- Seek to learn: “I want to know more about ___, could you give me a short summary over coffee? Also what material/books can you recommend?”
Daniel Sontag connects the bots: As Industry 4.0 lead and manager for connected products, he does what he loves — tying business to tech, and theory to practice.
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