The document discusses best practices for collaborating with engineers, emphasizing the role of the product owner in ensuring product-market fit and understanding engineers' motivations. It outlines the importance of adopting agile development practices alongside customer development to foster better collaboration and quality outputs. Keys to success include being the voice of the customer, ranking features by value, and including non-engineers in decision-making processes.

1. How to Work with Engineers
Alan Chiu
Head of Product and Co-Founder, Listo
Partner, XSeed Capital
Stanford GSB MSx 2011
@alanchiu
Stanford Graduate School of Business
November 12, 2015
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2. Stanford Graduate School of Business
Agenda
1. Product Owner
2. What Drives Engineers
3. Product Development Practices
4. Keys to Success
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3. Stanford Graduate School of Business
Alan Chiu
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4. Stanford Graduate School of Business
Agenda
1. Product Owner
2. What Drives Engineers
3. Product Development Practices
4. Keys to Success
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5. Stanford Graduate School of Business
Product Owner
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Final arbiter of product spec
Judged by product-market fit
Voice of the customer

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Challenges
Product owner wants to ship now.
Non-technical product owners often do not
understand the implications of their asks.
Engineers want to build a quality product.
Engineers hate throwing away code.
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7. Stanford Graduate School of Business
Agenda
1. Product Owner
2. What Drives Engineers
3. Product Development Practices
4. Keys to Success
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8. Stanford Graduate School of Business
Seek first to understand.
— Stephen Covey
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What Drives Engineers
Work with smart people
Work on cool technology
Build something people actually use
Build their career
Stay current with the latest
tools/languages/frameworks/processes
Want their work to be seen — street cred
Afraid of working on something inconsequential
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Implications
First engineer the most difficult to recruit
Freedom to choose
Open source vs closed source
Product shipping experience
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12. Stanford Graduate School of Business
Your Key Allies
Engineering Manager
GSD
Cares about quality
Motivated by commercial success and talent
development
CTO
Tech visionary
Owns product architecture
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13. Stanford Graduate School of Business
Agenda
1. Product Owner
2. What Drives Engineers
3. Product Development Practices
4. Keys to Success
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Development Processes
Historical approach: Waterfall
Works if the team understands both the problem
and the solution well — rarely the case.
"Throw it over the wall" mentality leads to
adversarial rather than collaborative relationships.
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Development Processes
How it is done today: Customer Dev + Agile Dev
Customer Development — problem oriented
Agile Development — solution oriented
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17. Stanford Graduate School of Business
Customer Dev + Agile Dev
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18. Stanford Graduate School of Business
Agile Development Process
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20. Stanford Graduate School of Business
Agenda
1. Product Owner
2. What Drives Engineers
3. Product Development Practices
4. Keys to Success
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21. Stanford Graduate School of Business
Keys to Success
Be the voice of the customer.
Be genuinely curious and interested in
technology.
Rank features by bang-for-buck (value vs effort).
Include non-engineers in feature estimation
meetings.
Set aside bandwidth in every sprint to pay down
technical debt.
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22. Appendix
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Background: Agile Manifesto
Individuals and interactions over Processes and
tools
Working software over Comprehensive
documentation
Customer collaboration over Contract negotiation
Responding to change over Following a plan
http://agilemanifesto.org
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Agile Principles
Customer satisfaction by rapid delivery of useful software
Welcome changing requirements, even late in development
Working software is delivered frequently
Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers
Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be
trusted
Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-
location)
Working software is the principal measure of progress
... and more at http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
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Common Agile Practices
Scrum
Test-driven development
Velocity tracking
Backlogs
User stories
Retrospectives
Kanban
Continuous integration
Continuous deployment
... and many more
Book: Agile Product Management with Scrum
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27. Bhaskar Ghosh
VP Engineering & Ops
Nerdwallet
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Alan Chiu
Head of Product & Co-Founder, Listo
Partner, XSeed Capital