Strong engineering teams ship because their cross-functional relationships work.
That means aligning with product, collaborating with design, and staying in sync with everyone from support to sales. It’s not politics for its own sake; it’s how work moves.
Here’s what matters most.
Partnering with product
The EM–PM relationship is a daily collaboration. You bring engineering capacity, tradeoffs, and execution; they bring customer insight, priorities, and strategy. When it’s healthy, PMs also act as a shield, absorbing a lot of the organizational cross-winds so the team can build.
A few tactics that help:
Share your capacity model early (vacations, onboarding, KTLO [keep the lights on]) so scope matches reality.
Translate technical debt into business risk or velocity impact so it competes fairly with feature work.
Agree on who decides what: product owns the "why/what," engineering owns feasibility, sequencing, and staffing.
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