GUEST POST: Monitoring Engineers Without Interfering
As a Product Manager, I want to Tracking progress on your product unobtrusively
Developing Software is a team sport.
Your success as a product manager is directly tied to how you collaborate with others. Engineering, Sales, Customer Success, and even other Product Managers themselves.
To embody that spirit with Pivot2Product, we’ve opened the door to collaborate with others. In that spirit, today’s article is a guest posting from
Amy is the author of - a newsletter that covers real-world product management topics, one bit at a time. If you are starting a business or already in a product management career, this newsletter helps you build a world-class product
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Enter Amy.
Your emails about the status of a development project are going unanswered. There has yet to be any new status on your requirements. The program status shows green. The demo is in several weeks. If the program is green and you trust the team, can you wait for the demo?
Why Should Product Managers Get Involved in Development?
Consider you have a requirement to add chargeback codes in your storage reporting on your SaaS product. The chargeback codes are configured by the customer and are displayed in your UI and the storage report export file. All coding is done and the demo is scheduled. Here are the surprises you find in the demo:
The chargeback codes are limited to 3 digits and your biggest customer needs 6 digits
Customers can’t change the chargeback codes unless they open a support ticket
The UI can only display 3 chargeback codes per file
Now it is too late to make changes or the chargebacks feature needs to wait for the next iteration.
How can you prevent this frustrating situation?
Staying Involved Without Micromanaging
You can save time in the long run by staying close to your development team. Product managers need to understand how their requirements are going to work when delivered. Likewise, it is important to avoid:
Project management - because your project manager is doing this
Interrupting the development process - because this isn't efficient
You do want to add value and head off issues before delivery. How can you find the status without micromanaging the team?
Wait a minute…what is wrong with micromanaging engineering? Besides hurting your relationship with engineering, you are neglecting your product management work! Every time you are “helping” engineering or “checking on” engineering, you’ve neglected a business opportunity.
Instead of chasing your engineering team to “help”, you want engineering to seek out your perspective. The steps to compelling engineering to collaborate with product managers are :
Understand why you need development status
Make tracking one of your leadership superpowers
Celebrate what you learn in tracking
Let's dig into each step to make development tracking an unobtrusive and natural part of your product leadership practices!
Why Care About Development Status?
You have a great program manager and development leaders on your product team. You're getting detailed information at product team meetings about development status. You have access to burn-down charts and engineering dashboards showing everything is going as planned. Why would you do more monitoring?
The missing piece is the customer's perspective. As the product manager, you are the only one who can imagine how the whole product comes together. Your domain knowledge, customer conversations, and ability to see the product from the customer's perspective are crucial to visualizing how the components of your product come together.
Coming back to the chargeback demo, here are the ways to collaborate early and prevent demo surprises:
Provide timely feedback to design documents by bringing a customer example
In your regular 1 on 1s with engineering offer customer data for the demo
Provide comments on the test plan about the typical customer use cases
Show early screenshots to 1 or 2 sales engineers for feedback
Some additional ways product managers put together their vision of the development progress are:
Reading the design documents from the customer's perspective
Asking questions about the customer impact of a change
Discussing architecture changes with engineering leaders
Reading the comments from developers in bug reports and user stories
Attending every demo and taking screenshots to share with Marketing and Services
Celebrating the small steps in the development process
Let your customer's perspective be your guide in monitoring development status.
Tracking Habits for Product Managers
Now that you are straight about your unique role in visualizing the complete product change, what can you do about it? You have many demands on your time from stakeholders, sales, and customers. You can save time in the long run by staying close to development unobtrusively.
Product managers can save time in the product lifecycle by:
Spotting inconsistencies between front-end and back-end plans
Contributing to UX plans that avoid customer confusion
Heading off potential business case issues such as royalties, licensing, or performance impacts
Mitigating serviceability gaps
Evaluating documentation needs before delivery
With a few steps, you can create new habits that bring the right information to you. The habits that make a difference are:
Adding value every time you get status from your team
Providing feedback every time you are asked
Asking questions privately and publicly to build a visualization of the end product
These habits come into your "muscle memory" with practice! Some things to keep in mind when building these habits are below.
Share What You Learn
After getting information on development status and visualizing the outcome of your requirements, you can add more value by sharing what you learn. Documenting your perspective has these benefits:
An early start on marketing material
Visuals for your product documentation
Stakeholder updates on product status
Preview key changes to a few sales engineers for early feedback
Recognition of product team progress
Soon you are sought out for insight into the upcoming product change because you have added value from your tracking.
Conclusion - Tracking without Interfering
Showing your product manager value during the development phase is a balance of tracking without disrupting your developers. Product managers are in a unique position to represent the customer perspective and avoid problems late in the development cycle. By contributing the customer's perspective in tracking development status, engineering can reciprocate. Before long, you have insights into the status of development.
A successful product manager still gets involved in the development phase of product changes - even if their product team has outstanding program managers and trusted development leaders. The steps for product managers to get involved in the development work are:
Recognize your purpose in monitoring development
Bring in your customer insight and add value
Elevate tracking into a leadership skill
Help the team grow while staying informed
Show the positive outcome of tracking
Use your knowledge from monitoring to celebrate progress
Taking these steps fosters product learning across the product team, brings in the customer perspective, and produces a whole product that customers want.
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