Framework: Building Engineering Trust
A framework for product managers and leaders outlines how to build trust with engineering teams by demonstrating empathy. Key areas of focus include understanding architectural decisions, scalability concerns, and the complexities of technical tradeoffs.
- The framework's creator, Irene Yu, is the founder and CEO of Skiplevel, a company that provides technical training for product managers, drawing from her experience as a software engineer at Amazon. - Yu proposes a "FAIR" framework for technical discussions, which stands for Feasibility, Alternate Solutions, Impact, and Risk Mitigation, to structure conversations between product and engineering teams. - A key principle taught by Yu is that product managers don't need to learn to code, but must understand technical fundamentals and trade-offs to build empathy and respect with engineers. - Engineers' core needs from product managers are clarity and trust in the "why" behind what is being built, so they have a framework for making trade-off decisions during implementation. - Another model for understanding engineering team dynamics is the BICEPS framework, which outlines six core needs: Belonging, Improvement, Choice, Equality, Predictability, and Status. - Research from McKinsey indicates that organizations with strong cross-functional communication outperform their peers in productivity and innovation by 23%. - A common failure mode for technical product managers is overstepping into the "how" of implementation, which can alienate engineers who see it as their area of ownership. - To build credibility, managers are advised to shadow code reviews, study postmortems to understand system failure modes, and visually map data flows to grasp the technical reality beyond high-level diagrams.
