While intended to improve efficiency, the rise of Agile ceremonies and specialized roles like Product Managers has created layers of abstraction. This often "hides" engineers from direct customer interaction, reducing their understanding of the "why" behind their work.
Related Insights
Even roles far from the customer, like engineering, make countless micro-decisions. Without an intuitive understanding of customer pull—what they're trying to achieve and why they're blocked—these decisions will likely miss the mark, even when just following a requirements document.
Instead of a traditional product roadmap, give engineers ownership of a broad "problem space." This high-agency model pushes them to get "forward deployed" with customers, uncover real needs, and build solutions directly. This ensures product development is tied to actual pain points and fosters a strong sense of ownership.
A significant maturity gap in large organizations is that internal platform PMs don't treat their users (e.g., developers, finance) as customers. Applying customer-centric practices like problem framing and journey mapping to these stakeholders can dramatically improve outcomes.
A platform's immediate user is the developer. However, to demonstrate true value, you must also understand and solve for the developer's end customer. This "two-hop" thinking is essential for connecting platform work to tangible business outcomes, not just internal technical improvements.
Engineering often defaults to a 'project mindset,' focusing on churning out features and measuring velocity. True alignment with product requires a 'product mindset,' which prioritizes understanding the customer and tracking the value being delivered, not just the output.
Sundial founder Julie Zhu intentionally avoids hiring product managers. This constraint forces engineers to take full ownership of the product definition and user value, preventing them from delegating critical product thinking and developing a stronger sense of customer empathy.
Most engineers only interact with customers during negative events like outages or escalations. To build customer empathy and a product mindset, leaders must intentionally create positive touchpoints. This includes sending engineers to customer conferences or including them on low-stakes customer calls.
Instead of siloing roles, encourage engineers to design and designers to code. This cross-functional approach breaks down artificial barriers and helps the entire team think more holistically about the end-to-end user experience, as a real user does not see these internal divisions.
To get product management buy-in for technical initiatives like refactoring or scaling, engineering leadership is responsible for translating the work into clear business or customer value. Instead of just stating the technical need, explain how it enables faster feature development or access to a larger customer base.
In an organization still running in project mode, the 'Product Manager' title is misleading. The role is often relegated to organizing work and scheduling tasks for engineering. A true product model requires empowering these roles with the mandate, skills, and market access to make strategic decisions.
