PMs and Engineers
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How a Product Manager can work best with Engineers
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PMs and Engineers
- 2. Introductions ● Mike Siegel, Senior PM @ Social Tables (@mikejsiegel) ● Nate Rentmeester, PM @ Contactually ● Rohit Kalkur, Senior Engineer @ Social Tables ● Derek Haller, Director of PM @ Social Tables (@derekhaller)
- 3. Objective of the Meetup Create a DC-based community of Product Managers and Product Leaders
- 4. What makes an excellent Product Manager? The best product managers do three things: Articulate what a winning product looks like. Rally the team to build it. Iterate on it until they get it right. Are incredibly empathetic
- 5. What’s the etiquette? Interrupt sparingly and appropriately E.g., Respect headphones Work asynchronously with them (this benefits you too) Assume good intentions Communicate the way your team prefers, not the way you prefer Be direct and explicit about what you know and don’t know
- 6. How do you gain respect? Remove Roadblocks Build Relationships Admit Your Mistakes Give Credit / Don’t Place Blame Focus on details Don’t use buzzwords
- 7. How do you achieve buy in? Sharing in the Decision Making Thought Process Making the WHY clear Data-informed decisions Present problems, not solutions Transparency - Communicate clearly and often
- 8. When You Disagree How do you kill features engineers have worked on and love? How do you push back on second guessing despite sharing all of your data and reasoning? Save your No’s for the things that truly matter Get someone on your side
- 9. How do you create empathy? Involve engineers early Share your thought process Give relevant updates at the end of the Standups that may be interesting and help show your work Bring engineers on customer development calls Bring engineers on sales calls Bring engineers on support calls Establish a metric of accountability (e.g., Velocity)
- 10. Empathy isn’t one-sided Sit in the trenches with them Never be the one who goes home early Be there for all late nights, all deploys, even if you just bring the donuts Listen to the technical conversations
- 11. Accountability & Motivation How to ensure people are following agreed upon processes Creating a sense of urgency How to deal with “excuses”
- 12. Writing a good User Story As a (type of user), I want (some goal), so that (some reason) Given Then When Frequency As an Event Planner, I want to find guest quickly, so that I may check a guest in Given: A guest list has been loaded into Attendee Manager When: A guest has told a Planner their name
- 13. What to include in a good design? Sketch & Invision Internationalization: what does this design look like in another language? Notably German with its layout-threatening long words? Error states: what happens when network connectivity is lost; databases crash, etc? User extremes: what does this page look like if the user using this has no information or activity? What about if the user has tons and tons of information or activity? Transitions: what is the precise way that screen A becomes screen B?
- 14. Writing a good bug URL Summary Description Reproduce steps: Clearly mention the steps to reproduce the bug. Expected result: How application should behave on above mentioned steps. Actual result: What is the actual result on running above steps i.e. the bug behavior.
- 15. Brainstorm / Community ● Future Meetups ● What do you all want from this community?
Editor's Notes
- Introductions Mike Derek Rohit Nate Goals of the Meetup Group To meet other PMs in DC To share our experiences with others and learn from them Goal of this Meetup To K
- Point of this slide is that working effectively with engineering is a huge part of being an effective product manager Use Google Slide Questions Do we have a free way to poll users? http://firstround.com/review/find-vet-and-close-the-best-product-managers-heres-how/ http://www.mindtheproduct.com/2014/03/product-managers-5-ways-you-can-make-an-engineers-job-easier/ http://svpg.com/product-management-vs-engineering/ http://blog.aha.io/hey-product-managers-stop-pissing-off-the-engineers/ http://alphahq.com/blog/product-managers-can-build-rapport-engineers/
- Talk about establishing code of conduct. Talk about the Engineering etiquette guidlines - https://socialtables.atlassian.net/wiki/display/ENGN/Guidelines+for+Effective+Collaboration Encourage people to understand their etiquette and to document it if it doesn’t exist POLL - How many people have a code of conduct / etiquette documented? Talk about the benefits of a team charter. Show the AM3 Team Charter - https://socialtables.atlassian.net/wiki/display/PROD/AM3+Team+Charter
- Talk about being a Servant-leader and what that means Talk about an time you did a good job of building a relationship How do you admit mistakes? When was the last time you did it? Giving Credit - Talk about our weekly demos, end of quarter demos, pig of the sprint 5. Remove roadblocks Another vital role of a Product Manager is to negotiate – with management, marketing, design and other departments. Shield your engineers from unnecessary meetings and other daily interruptions – if it’s important that they attend a meeting, it’s your responsibility to consider the effect it will have on productivity and make that call. Do your best to empower your development team by making sure they have everything they need in order to get the job done. This could be anything from overhauling the product development process in order to make the team more efficient, to the little things such as ensuring that design assets are prepared prior to implementation, or making sure that concepts are validated with prototypes. This can be difficult in agile teams, but practice makes perfect!
- Talk about the mid-quarter refresher Talk about the importance of a roadmap and vivid vision Talk about making general themes for sprints a couple of months out and tying them to quarterly KPIs qualitative and quantitative data to defend product decisions and resource allocation. Experimental data make for a much better conversation starting point than do opinions when it comes to making decisions. Second, and perhaps more importantly, experimentation sets expectations throughout the company. If you make it clear that every product decision and prototype is an experiment, you won’t lose as much trust with your engineers when every product or feature isn’t a big hit. Instead, your goal becomes learning rather than winning, and to that end, every experiment is a success. Present problems, not solutions As a Product Manager, it’s your job to edit and prioritise solving problems – but it’s not your job to come up with the final solution. Good Product Managers approach engineers with obstacles and questions, and listen to the solutions and trade-offs proposed by them. You can help a developer out by respecting his or her ability to think about the problem and deliver a watertight solution.
- Be transparent with engineers about hypotheses behind features and set them up to understand it’s an experiment Talk about asking the engineer what they would need to be convinced. Gather more data Example - Kyle and Ben are not convinced Groups need names. I’m asking all of the Customer Development people this exact question along with their use case as to why which I can convey back to the team
- Talk about the meeting for Seating and Tables with the group Ask the panel about the difficulty of involving all of the engineers and digging into dev time Talk about the survey results from the Registration system as an example of something I’ve done recently at the end of a standup
- Doing code as a tutorial is not necessarily a good way since it’s like training wheels
- Poll - How many people here are Scrum Masters? https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/how-to-work-with-engineers-a3163ff1eced#.w7kjlkviv Poll - How many people use JIRA? Talk about our JIRA Flow Design Review Ready for Development In Development Open Merged Deployed to Sandbox QA In progress Ready to Deploy Shipped Will Not Do Code Review Send to Code Review
- Talk about how Sketch allows engineers to quickly recreate what the designer is looking for. Poll - How many people use Sketch? Talk about the benefits of a high fidelity prototype like Invision. Seeing the transitions, understanding the view. Talk about Design Reviews. When the Designer implements a mock up and when the developer implements the mockup