Product and technology are two sides of the same coin in modern software businesses. Exceptional customer experiences are created when world-class product thinking meets well-crafted technical execution.
However, a lack of alignment between product and engineering teams can severely impede a company’s ability to build great products efficiently. Mismatched priorities lead to disjointed roadmaps, products full of technical debt, and poor system performance that frustrates customers.
So how can heads of product (CPOs) and heads of engineering (CTOs) foster greater collaboration and symbiosis between their departments? Here are 5 key strategies top technology leaders employ at high-performing digital companies:
Unify Around Customer Outcomes
The single biggest driver of product/engineering misalignment is when each team focuses solely on their domain area without tying work back to actual customer and business outcomes.
CTOs may push technical priorities like infrastructure upgrades that have no clear customer benefit. Meanwhile, CPOs drive new features that users don’t really need. This divides the focus of the two teams.
Top CPOs and CTOs align their groups by constantly connecting work to specific customer and business goals – like improving conversion rates or accelerating feature release velocity. This gives both teams a shared north star. Initiatives large and small can be evaluated based on their measurable impact on those strategic objectives.
Both leaders must reinforce that at the end of the day, technology and product deliver customer and business value – not just architecturally pure systems or a laundry list of new features.
Institute Cross-Functional Leadership
Siloed organizations breed misaligned priorities between departments. But shared leadership and decision-making fosters mutual understanding between groups.
Forward-looking CPOs and CTOs build out their leadership teams with leaders from the other domain. For example, heads of key engineering verticals should sit on the product leadership team and vice versa.
This ensures representatives from technology and product are embedded in planning processes for the other group. It gives each team visibility into what the other group is focused on and why.
Cross-functional leadership allows concerns to be raised early and builds trust on both sides. It also leads to solutions that proactively bridge product and technical needs upfront versus having to reconcile competing priorities after the fact.
Design Collaborative Roadmapping Processes
Most friction between product and engineering occurs during roadmap planning when disjointed priorities lead to schedules overloaded with mismatched commitments.
Top technology leaders institute quarterly roadmap planning sessions with integrated product and engineering participation. Groups come together, share latest learnings, and build unified 90-day roadmaps centered on the most pressing customer needs.
By bringing both teams together rather than separately planning then reconciling roadmaps, priorities are collectively discussed. Trade-offs are made collaboratively with both technology constraints and customer benefits in mind leading to more realistic commitments.
Ongoing backlog refinement sessions also ensure there are no surprises around technical debt or platform needs impacting feature delivery as both groups have transparency into dependencies.
Foster Knowledge Sharing
Lack of cross-functional empathy and literacy often breeds hostility and finger pointing between groups. Engineering may see product as demanding and unempathetic to development challenges. Product may view engineering as obstinate and needlessly obstructionist.
CPOs and CTOs can counteract this by institutionalizing knowledge sharing programs. Examples include lunch-and-learns explaining product concepts to engineers and technical architecture overviews for product managers.
Job shadowing, rotations, and open office hour sessions also build literacy across groups. The more each team understands the priorities and pain points of the other, the more mutual empathy develops within roadmap trade-off discussions and requirement planning.
Co-locate Teams
Proximity breeds familiarity. Top technology leaders physically integrate product management and engineering teams together to reinforce cross-functional harmony.
Co-location facilitates impromptu hallway conversations to resolve tensions or blockers. It also builds natural relationships between technical and non-technical staff allowing people to attach faces to names when collaboratively solving customer problems.
For remote teams, shared digital collaboration spaces and always-on video rooms create virtual proximity between product and engineering staff. The more contact between groups, the less likely issues spiral due to miscommunication and easier it becomes to jointly brainstorm solutions.
By unifying product and engineering teams around shared goals, decision-making, planning and mutual understanding, CPOs and CTOs can significantly boost delivery velocity, system quality, and customer satisfaction. But this requires both technology leaders to actively nurture collaboration through deliberate initiatives spanning organizational design, processes, and communication.
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