How to Align Product and Engineering Teams

Bill Bethel once said, “A successful team is a group of many hands and one mind.”

But how often have your product and engineering teams pulled in different directions, each convinced they have the right approach to building your software? 

As a product manager, have you felt frustrated that your engineers don’t understand your customers’ needs? 

And as an engineer, have you found product roadmaps unrealistic given technology constraints?

If this dynamic sounds all too familiar, you’re not alone. Aligning product and engineering is one of the biggest challenges companies face. Without transparent processes and responsibilities defined, it’s easy for these teams to work at cross-purposes. Product features languish as priorities shift. Roadmaps slip further from reality with each iteration.

More importantly, your customers ultimately suffer due to a lack of coordination between the “what” people and the “how” people. They receive inadequate feedback, leaving needs unmet. New releases under-deliver on promised capabilities.

In this article, we’ll discuss how to avoid these pitfalls and get your product and engineering teams rowing in the same direction. 

We’ll cover best practices to get your software into customers’ hands faster with each new version. It’s time to stop pulling against each other and start pulling together to build the great software your customers deserve.

How to Align Product and Engineering Teams

Aligning product and engineering teams is crucial for the success of any organization, especially those that rely heavily on technology and innovation. 

When these teams work in sync, it can lead to faster product development, better product quality, and greater customer satisfaction. Here are some strategies to align product and engineering teams effectively:

• Shared Goals and Objectives: Define common goals and objectives that both teams can work towards. It could include quarterly or yearly targets that align with the organization’s overall strategy.

• Clear Communication Channels: Establish transparent and open communication channels between product and engineering teams.

• Product Roadmaps: Develop a product roadmap that outlines the long-term vision and strategy for the product. This roadmap should be shared with both teams so that everyone understands the direction and priorities.

• User-Centric Approach: Ensure that product and engineering teams focus on meeting user needs and delivering value to customers. Customer feedback should get integrated into the development process.

• Feedback Loops: Create feedback loops between the teams. Product teams can provide regular updates on market trends and customer needs. In contrast, engineering teams can offer insights into technical constraints and possibilities.

• Prioritization Framework: Implement a clear prioritization framework considering business and technical factors when deciding what features or projects to work on next.

• Collaborative Tools: Use collaborative tools like project management software, version control systems, and communication platforms to facilitate communication and information sharing.

• Regular Retrospectives: Hold regular retrospectives to assess what’s working and what needs improvement in the collaboration between product and engineering teams. Use this feedback to make continuous adjustments.

Remember that aligning product and engineering teams is an ongoing process that requires commitment and effort from both sides.

Step 1: Shared Goals and Objectives

Product managers and engineers need to understand the product vision and strategy deeply. Product managers can break down the product strategy into distinct themes, objectives, and key results (OKRs) to achieve this.

Objectives are specific goals that the team wants to achieve within a particular time frame.

By breaking down the product strategy into themes, objectives, and critical results, product managers can create a clear and concise roadmap for engineers. It helps to ensure that everyone aligns with the goals and priorities of the team.

Here is an example of how product managers can break down the product strategy into themes, objectives, and key results:

Theme: User engagement

Objective: Increase the average time spent on the app by 10% in the next quarter.

Key results:

• Increase the number of daily active users by 5% in the next month.
• Increase the average number of sessions per user by 10% next month.
• Increase the average session length by 5% in the next month.

It is just one example, of course. The specific themes, objectives and critical results will vary depending on the product and the team’s goals.

Product managers can create a shared understanding of the product vision and strategy by sharing themes, objectives, and critical results with engineers. It helps improve communication and collaboration, leading to better products.

The challenge in product development is often having a straightforward way to determine which product features are helping reach the overall goals. Without this clarity, wasting time and resources on less important features is easy.

Chisel helps by letting you set specific objectives for your product. You can use these objectives to compare different features and see which ones are most aligned with your goals. This way, you can focus on the features that matter most and make better decisions throughout the product’s development.

Step 2: Set Clear Communication Channels

Effective communication is vital for ensuring that product and engineering teams work seamlessly together. To establish clear communication channels for alignment between product and engineering teams, follow these steps:

• Identify the communication needs of both teams: What information do they need to share with each other? How often do they need to communicate? What channels do they prefer?

• Choose a variety of communication channels: This will help ensure that everyone has a way to communicate that is comfortable for them. Some examples of communication channels include:
  • Regular team meetings
  • One-on-one meetings
  • Asynchronous communication tools, such as email, chat, or project management software
  • Visual aids, such as product roadmaps or wireframes
• Set expectations for each communication channel: This includes things like the frequency of communication, the purpose of each channel, and the best way to use it. For example, you could have a weekly team meeting to discuss progress on the product roadmap and then use email or chat for more ad hoc communication.

• Encourage open and honest communication: Create a culture where both product and engineering teams feel comfortable sharing their ideas, concerns, and feedback. This will help to identify and resolve potential issues early on.

• Regularly review and update your communication channels: As your teams and products evolve, your communication needs may change. Make sure to revisit your communication plan regularly to ensure that it is still meeting the needs of everyone involved.

In the product development process, it can be challenging to gather and prioritize input from various team members with diverse expertise. Without a structured approach, valuable insights from different perspectives may be overlooked, leading to missed opportunities and potential issues in the final product.

Chisel’s “Your Feedback” view ensures that everyone’s voice is heard, making it easy for team members to provide input and contribute their expertise. This inclusivity leads to better decision-making and a more well-rounded product.

Step 3: Make Use of Product Roadmaps

A product roadmap is a high-level plan that outlines your product’s vision, goals, and key features. It helps you align your product and engineering teams around a common vision and ensure that you’re all working towards the same goals.

However, unlike a road trip itinerary, a product roadmap is not set in stone. It’s a living document that should be updated regularly as you learn more about your customers and the market.

Why is it important to align product and engineering teams?

When product and engineering teams are aligned, they can work more efficiently and effectively to bring products to market faster. They are also better equipped to respond to changes in the market and customer needs.

How can a product roadmap help to align product and engineering teams?

A product roadmap can help to align product and engineering teams by:

• Communicating the product vision and goals to the entire team
• Prioritizing features and requirements
• Setting timelines and expectations
• Facilitating regular communication and collaboration

Here are some tips for creating a product roadmap that will help you align your product and engineering teams:

• Gather Input from Stakeholders: Engage with stakeholders, including customers, sales, marketing, support, and leadership. Collect their feedback and insights on what features or improvements are needed to meet the product’s goals and address user needs.

• Prioritize Features and Initiatives: Work with cross-functional teams to prioritize the features and initiatives that align with your product vision and goals. Consider factors like customer impact, market demand, technical feasibility, and business value when prioritizing.

• Create a Roadmap Timeline: Develop a timeline for your product roadmap. This timeline should outline when specific features or initiatives are planned for release. Depending on your product and industry, this could be a quarterly, semi-annual, or annual roadmap.

• Use a Visual Format: Visualize your roadmap using a format that’s easy to understand, such as a Gantt chart or a timeline-based roadmap. Various software tools are also available for creating digital roadmaps that can be easily shared and updated.

• Include Key Milestones: Highlight key milestones and deliverables on the roadmap. These could be significant feature releases, product launches, or critical development phases. Milestones provide a clear sense of progress.

• Communicate and Align: Share the roadmap with both the product and engineering teams. Ensure that everyone understands the priorities, timelines, and dependencies. Encourage open communication to address any questions or concerns.

Without a centralized and effective roadmap planning solution, teams may struggle to prioritize tasks, communicate their progress, and adapt to changing priorities.

Chisel’s Roadmaps pillar provides a centralized place for product and engineering teams to collaborate on roadmaps. This helps to ensure that everyone is on the same page and that the roadmap is aligned with the company’s overall goals. From Timeline View to Prioritization, Chisel offers it all.

Step 4: Embrace User-Centric Approach

Imagine you’re a product manager at a tech company. You’re responsible for developing a new social media app. You’re excited about your vision for the product, but you know that you can’t achieve it without the help of your engineering team.

That’s where a user-centric approach comes in. A user-centric approach to product development is all about focusing on the needs and wants of your users. It means involving users in the development process at every stage, from ideation to testing.

Deloitte and Touche conducted a study revealing that companies prioritizing their customers were 60% more profitable than those neglecting customer-centricity. Furthermore, it was found that 64% of companies led by a customer-focused CEO outperformed their rivals in terms of profitability.

When you take a user-centric approach, you’re more likely to develop a product that users will love and use. And when your users are happy, your product is more likely to be successful.

Here are some tips for implementing a user-centric approach to aligning product and engineering teams:

• Involve both teams in user research: This will help both teams to understand the needs of users and develop a shared understanding of the product vision.

• Create user personas and user stories: User personas are fictional representations of your ideal users. User stories are short descriptions of how users will interact with your product. These tools can help to keep both teams focused on the user throughout the development process.

• Get feedback from users early and often: This will help you to identify any potential problems with your product and make changes early on.

Read: How to Gather and Analyze User Feedback Effectively

• Use data to make decisions: Track user behavior and engagement data to see how users are interacting with your product and identify areas for improvement.

Chisel can help product managers embrace a user-centric approach by providing a central place to collect, manage, and analyze user feedback. 

Product managers can create surveys and send them out to users, and users can provide feedback directly within Chisel. Chisel also provides tools for product managers to analyze and synthesize the feedback so they can make informed decisions about their products.

Step 5: Don’t Forget About Feedback Loops

Imagine you’re building a new product, and you’re excited to get it into the hands of your customers. You’ve worked hard to define the product vision and roadmap, and you’re confident that your product will be a success.

But then, you start to run into problems. The engineering team is struggling to meet your deadlines, and they’re constantly coming back to you with questions. You’re starting to feel frustrated, and you’re worried that your product launch is going to be delayed.

What’s the problem?

In many cases, the problem is a lack of communication and collaboration between the product and engineering teams. The product team may not be fully understanding the technical constraints that the engineering team is facing, and the engineering team may not be fully understanding the customer needs that the product team is trying to meet.

This is where feedback loops come in.

What are feedback loops?

A feedback loop is a process of collecting information from one source, using it to improve something, and then measuring the impact of that improvement on the original source.

In the context of product and engineering teams, a feedback loop is a process of collecting feedback from customers and using it to improve the product. The feedback loop then continues, with the improved product being used to collect more feedback from customers, and so on.

Why are feedback loops important?

Feedback loops are important because they help to ensure that the product and engineering teams are aligned. The product team can use the feedback from customers to understand what is working well and what needs to be improved. The engineering team can then use this feedback to make the necessary changes to the product.

How to create feedback loops between product and engineering teams

There are a number of ways to create feedback loops between product and engineering teams. Here are a few ideas:

• Regular meetings: Schedule regular meetings between the product and engineering teams to discuss progress, share feedback, and identify any potential roadblocks.

• Customer interviews: Invite the engineering team to participate in customer interviews. This will help them to understand better the customer needs that they are trying to meet.

• Beta testing: Give the engineering team early access to new features so that they can test them and provide feedback.

• User feedback tools: Use user feedback tools to collect feedback from customers and share it with the engineering team.

Businesses often struggle to establish and manage an effective feedback loop with their customers. This challenge stems from the difficulty in collecting, organizing, and prioritizing customer ideas and suggestions, resulting in missed opportunities for innovation and improvement.

Chisel’s “Feedback Portal” provides a solution to this by offering a user-friendly platform for customers to share their ideas seamlessly. With Chisel, businesses can create a dedicated portal accessible via a simple link, enabling customers to effortlessly submit, store, and prioritize their ideas. 

This innovation source leverages customer feedback as a valuable resource, empowering businesses to make informed decisions, enhance their products or services, and strengthen customer relationships.

Step 6: Implement an Effective Prioritization Framework

Imagine you’re a product manager, and you’re responsible for a popular SaaS product. You have a lot of great ideas for new features and improvements, but you can’t implement them all at once. You need a way to prioritize your work so that you’re focusing on the things that will have the biggest impact.

That’s where a prioritization framework comes in. A prioritization framework is a set of criteria that you can use to evaluate and rank your work. This helps you focus on the most important things and ensure you’re aligned with your engineering team.

A prioritization framework is a system for evaluating and ranking product features or projects. It typically takes into account a variety of factors, such as:

• Business value: How much impact will this feature or project have on the business?

• Customer value: How much impact will this feature or project have on customers?

• Technical feasibility: How difficult and time-consuming will it be to implement this feature or project?

• Risk: What are the risks associated with implementing this feature or project?

• Effort: How much resources will be required to implement this feature or project?

A study has highlighted that requirements prioritization holds a pivotal role in supporting decision-making within software engineering. This is especially evident when it serves as input for more advanced release planning and negotiation methods. These methods involve critical decisions concerning what to develop and when to undertake development activities.

A prioritization framework is essential because it helps you to:

• Focus on the most important things: By evaluating your work based on a set of criteria, you can identify the features or projects that will have the biggest impact on your business and customers.

• Make better trade-offs: When you have a lot of work to do, you need to make trade-offs. A prioritization framework can help you to make these trade-offs in a more informed way.

• Align your team: By using a common prioritization framework, you can ensure that everyone on your team is on the same page and that everyone is working towards the same goals.

There are several different prioritization frameworks that you can use. Some popular frameworks include RICE, MoSCoW, and the Kano model.

Prioritization drivers are essential for evaluating each feature and creating a prioritization score, but it can be difficult to define and align prioritization drivers with the organization’s KPIs or eventual goals. Additionally, it can be challenging to compare features to one another based on a prioritization score.

Chisel offers the RICE framework, a prioritization framework that considers four factors: Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. Chisel’s framework provides a structured approach to decision-making, ensuring that product development efforts are aligned with the organization’s strategic objectives and are in harmony with the engineering team’s capabilities.

Step 7: Collaborative Tools Are Your Allies

Product and engineering teams are the two sides of the same coin when it comes to developing successful products. But without effective collaboration, these teams can quickly become siloed and out of sync, leading to missed deadlines, unhappy customers, and, ultimately, product failure.

A notable statistic reveals that 56% of employers utilize online collaboration tools and social media as channels for communicating with their employees.

That’s where collaborative tools come in. Collaborative tools can help product and engineering teams to:

• Communicate more effectively: Collaborative tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom can help product and engineering teams communicate more easily and efficiently, both in real-time and asynchronously. This can help to reduce misunderstandings, improve decision-making, and keep everyone on the same page.

• Share information more easily: Collaborative tools like Chisel can help product and engineering teams share information more easily, including product roadmaps, user stories, technical documentation, and code reviews. This can help to ensure that everyone has the information they need to do their job effectively.

• Work together more seamlessly: Collaborative tools can help product and engineering teams work together more seamlessly on tasks and projects. For example, project management tools can help teams to track progress, identify and resolve dependencies, and manage resources. Version control systems can help teams collaborate on code development and track changes.

If you’re not using collaborative tools to align your product and engineering teams, you’re missing out. Collaborative tools can help you to be more efficient, productive, and successful.

Effective collaboration between product and engineering teams is crucial for successful product development. However, without streamlined communication and collaboration tools, these teams can become isolated from each other, leading to missed deadlines, customer dissatisfaction, and potential product failure.

Chisel offers collaborative tools to bridge this gap. The “Team Participation View” ensures that feature evaluation involves the entire team, showing who has participated and allowing feature voting. Slack and MS Teams integrations enhance communication. Slack keeps everyone informed, while MS Teams connects Chisel to Microsoft Teams for efficient notifications. 

Step 8: Incorporate Regular Retrospectives

Regular retrospectives are essential for aligning product and engineering teams. They provide an opportunity for team members to reflect on what’s working and what needs improvement in the collaboration process. This feedback can then be used to make continuous adjustments and improve the alignment between the two teams.

Here are some specific ways that regular retrospectives can help to align product and engineering teams:

• Identify and address communication challenges: Communication is key to alignment, and retrospectives can help to identify and address any communication challenges that are occurring. For example, team members may feel like they are not getting enough information from the product manager, or they may feel like their feedback is not being heard.

• Uncover and resolve process bottlenecks: Retrospectives can also help uncover and resolve any process bottlenecks that are preventing teams from working efficiently. For example, the team may find that the review process for new features is taking too long or that the handoff process between product and engineering is not smooth.

• Build trust and collaboration: Retrospectives can also help to build trust and collaboration between product and engineering teams. When team members feel comfortable sharing their feedback and concerns, it creates a more open and collaborative environment.

Chisel’s Idea Box can help to address communication challenges between product and engineering teams by providing a central place for both groups to share and discuss ideas. This can help to ensure that everyone is on the same page and that feedback is being heard from all stakeholders.

Key Takeaways

The challenge of aligning product and engineering teams is ensuring that both groups are working towards the same goals in a collaborative manner. Without clear processes and ongoing communication, it is easy for these teams to work at cross-purposes.

This article outlined several best practices for overcoming this challenge, including establishing shared goals and objectives, implementing strong communication channels, using a product roadmap to provide direction, embracing a user-centric approach, creating feedback loops, prioritizing work effectively, leveraging collaborative tools, and incorporating regular retrospectives.

By following these steps, product managers and engineers can develop a shared understanding of the product vision and strategy. They will be better equipped to make decisions based on user needs and focus their efforts on the most critical initiatives. Regular collaboration and feedback will also help the teams to work seamlessly through any roadblocks.

The continued success of your software depends on frequent alignment between its creators. We recommend starting your alignment efforts using Chisel, the ultimate product management tool.

Chisel provides visibility into priorities while facilitating collaboration across teams. Over time, you can strengthen alignment through feedback loops, prioritization framework, and other Chisel pillars. With the right processes in place, your product and engineering teams will be positioned to deliver exceptional software and maximize customer value.

With Chisel, your product managers and engineers will develop a shared understanding of the product vision and work together effectively.

Start your alignment journey with Chisel and watch your teams unite, delivering exceptional software and maximum customer value.

Experience the future of product management with Chisel. Try it today!