Healthy Tension: The Relationship Between Product and Engineering
The oft given advice in product circles is that the best performing teams emerge from a healthy tension – great outcomes are forged under pressure. The idea is that in order to maximize the results from my engineering colleagues, I should ask for something slightly unreasonable, which through conflict we'll walk back to an optimal outcome.
This is the right advice, but it's often focused in the wrong direction. Product teams are encouraged to push for more velocity from their engineering teams. If I complete more stories, then more code is written, then I get to where I'm going faster. The reason this doesn't work is it puts the focus on the wrong variable -> output instead of outcomes. Metrics can be gamed. I can push up delivery metrics 20-50% just by having the team resize all of our stories up a notch. Is that really an effective outcome?
Instead, the right way to create a healthy tension is to push the team on what is being created, not how they're doing it. Provide the team with forward-looking context to help shape the code being written. Agree on a set of north-star metrics to help make development decisions. Review designs with the team to determine whether non-functional requirements are being considered, or whether we're making the proper tradeoff decisions. Your challenge shouldn't be if they're writing code fast enough, but whether the code they're writing is going to give the desired outcome.
The north star for my current product is speed to market. Our primary role is to feed Kafka events to our business domain services. How quickly I can get an event produced is what I care the most about. Simply pushing my team to deliver more points doesn't get me the outcome I want – more often than not it gets me the opposite outcome. The tension I want to create is whether we're putting the right tooling in place to produce events. In six months, I want to be able to deliver 20 events in the same amount of time it takes me to deliver one today.
As product professionals, we preach outcomes over outputs constantly to stakeholders. That shouldn't fly out the window when we're working with our engineering colleagues. Creating a healthy tension is a good thing, but it needs to be focused on what actually matters.
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