June 4th, 2003
Working with Engineering
Speaker: Atul Suklikar, Sr. Director, Product Marketing, Softrock Systems

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Atul Suklikar presented on Working Effectively with Engineering to a crowded room at the June 4th meeting of the SVPMA. Atul imparted practical advice on building lasting relationships with the people who actually build the products.

Before co-founding Softrock Systems, Atul spent six years at Siebel, where he was the senior director of the e-business platform. He also understands the engineering perspective through his direct experience as a developer at Oracle for four years. Atul received his BS in electrical engineering from Cal Tech and his MS in Computer Science and MBA from Stanford.

Atul grabbed the audiences attention on his second slide addressing Engineers Demonization of Product Management, which included an audio clip from Scottish comedian Billy Connolly. In the sound byte, a boss rattles off a litany of unreasonable demands to his staff. In software terms, this means subsecond response time, flexibility, usability, standards support, new features, enhancements, bug fixes, plenty of bells and whistles, and to have it all yesterday!

Atul then launched into the core of his presentation: how to work with engineering to ensure that product strategy becomes product reality and have fun in the process. To do this, product management must provide value to engineering by being the voice of the customer, prioritizing product features and themes, guiding product wins, and forwarding the engineering teams careers. This requires the product manager to be the customer expert, a partner to engineering, and a champion of the product.

Being an Expert
The product manager must achieve expertise of the customer, the product, and the market. You must understand how customers use the product across the customer base and then gain deep knowledge of a few of your accounts. You can demonstrate your expertise by incorporating these learnings into your presentations, conversations, and MRDs. You should also confirm your finding with other customer experts in the organization such as sales and services. When creating requirements, do not just pass on customer request; instead, synthesize the requirements, and understand the customer's business objective.

You should follow a similar method to achieve market expertise, gaining high-level knowledge of a large number of competitors and deep knowledge of a handful. Periodically share this information with engineering, through white papers, demos, and news clippings. Furthermore, use engineering to analyze underlying technology trends to augment your readings.

Becoming a product expert means understanding and using the product. Avoid the mistake of stating the product direction before understanding the current products capabilities. Take the technical training for your product if version already exists. You should install the development builds frequently and participate in testing. Speak with the engineers to understand the architecture of the product, focusing on the what as well as the why. Work to reinforce the perception that you understand the product through references to current behavior in MRD's and in meetings with Engineering.

Build a Partnership
The keys of a good partner are being reasonable, flexible, and personable. Reasonable means clearly communicating priorities and features. Requesting ten times the number of features than can fit in the development time line is. Articulating a multi-release approach is one way to be reasonable while still achieving a broad feature set. While building the relationship, first get agreement on what and then negotiate an agreement on when. Also, work with the engineering architects to own the vision and define the delivery roadmap.

Always keep the big picture in mind. You will repeat the process regularly over many features, releases, and products. Break down large features into granular sub-features so that essential aspects are not compromised. Entertain alternative implementations recommended by engineering that achieve the same goal. When necessary, be willing to make the case to management for additional resources.

Get to know your engineering staff and interact with them in non-work settings. You can go out to lunch or explore common interests such as movies and sports. Make a point to get to know the junior engineers. Drop by their office to chat about what they are working on, to see demos, and get ad-hoc feedback. Their feedback today is valuable, but they will also be the future senior engineers and architects. Always forward positive feedback from congratulatory emails to success stories from the field. Lastly, attend engineering staff meetings on an as-needed basis and invite the Engineering Manager to your staff meetings.

Be a Champion
Championing the product will contribute to its success and is part of a product managers responsibility. Everyone wants to be involved with a successful product. Further, by keeping engineering informed of product wins, they will remain excited and engaged. In addition, champion the engineering managers and staff members. Give credit to the engineers when speaking with other departments, nominate them for awards, and convey your appreciation to their managers.

Building an effective working relationship with engineering is an important step in creating a successful product. You can achieve this by supporting the engineers so that they are successful. First, become an expert on the customer and market and share that with the engineering team. Second, be reasonable in your product requests and judicious in your prioritization. Third, be a champion of both your product and the engineering team. Lastly, remember you are building a long term relationship that will contribute to your mutual success over many products and releases.