engineering meetings

The Cranky Product Manager had a religious experience recently, where the gods of enterprise software came to her in a vision and presented her with the Laws of Product Management. Being gods, they instructed her to share these sacred Laws with y’all. 

The Cranky Product Manager shall post each Law in a separate post. Eventually, when several Laws are posted, you can view them all together via the Divine Rules for Product Managers category.

Law #1: On preparing for potentially contentious meetings with Engineering

If thou plans to meet with the Engineering team, where thou suspects the Engineers will disagree with the recommended priorities for product development, then thou shall endeavor to informally meet with each member of the team individually beforehand. 

Over burritos or sushi, thou shall endeavor to convince each Engineer of your point of view, describing the use cases and the research thou has done to arrive at the recommendations.  Thou shalt be charming and nice and personable and actually listen for a change.

If the time allotted for lunch is too short to convince the Engineer, thou shall continue the conversation over beers after work.  An official “meeting” is to be avoided.

Again, it is emphasized that thou shalt meet with everyone on the team individually, from the mightiest architect to the meekest junior engineer.

If thou does this according to THE SOFTWARE LORD’S wishes, the big meeting with the Engineering team will go smoothly and everyone will leave with common agreement as to the features and priorities of the next release.

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