Building Stronger Product-Tech Relationships

As the tech landscape continues to change at an unprecedented pace, the synergy between product teams and engineering is no longer just beneficial—it’s essential for driving true innovation. When these groups aren’t aligned, what may seem like everyday operational issues—missed deadlines, slow decision-making, or disengaged meetings—often signals deeper breakdowns in product strategy. When teams take the time to dig into the root cause of these everyday issues, what they uncover is actually miscommunication, lack of shared vision, or weak feedback loops. What we find is that these challenges aren’t just operational—they reveal that teams are disconnected from the broader product vision, undermining the ability to deliver true value.

At the heart of this is a product mindset—a focus on end-users and delivering continuous value. No matter your role, adopting this approach leads to better collaboration and outcomes across the organization.

By addressing team dynamics and fostering alignment, organizations can strengthen their product mindset and unlock greater innovation and customer value.

A Path to Product Mindset: Moving in the Same Direction

Organizations often adhere to established frameworks like Agile, yet still struggle with silos between product and engineering. While Agile offers an excellent foundation, following any framework without introspection can lead to stagnation. Adopting a lean approach—agile with a small "a"—can be far more effective, though it requires navigating ambiguity and complexity. The reality is, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all framework because every team is different. High-performing teams succeed by setting their own bar for success, a process that thrives only when freed from excessive hierarchy and organizational politics.

The product mindset, with its emphasis on understanding customer needs and iterating toward delivering value, actually mirrors much of the agile manifesto’s core principles. It calls for prioritizing individuals and interactions, responding to change, and delivering working software frequently—all of which align with product mindset thinking. Both focus on being adaptable, customer-centric, and continuously improving based on feedback.

By embracing this shared foundation, teams can not only adopt agile methodologies but also cultivate a true product mindset, breaking down the silos between product and engineering. This begins with recognizing the symptoms of these disconnects.

Breaking Down Silos: Spotting the Symptoms

Teams must take a deep dive into their daily operations, assessing where breakdowns are happening. As a technical lead, architect, product owner, agilist, or any leader within an organization there are key symptoms to be on the lookout for. Some of these include:

• Isolated decision-making: Without cross-functional insights, teams often end up misaligned on strategy, leading to technical discrepancies and rework.
• Poor engagement: When team members are passively involved in planning or review sessions, it leads to miscommunication, confusion about goals, and reduced motivation.
• Broken feedback loops: Lack of timely feedback from users or technical evaluations can result in a product that doesn’t evolve effectively, leading to costly delays or product failures.

To spot symptoms of silos and the resulting lack of product mindset, observe where collaboration and communication break down. Are teams struggling to align on goals, or is information not flowing freely across departments? Pay attention to team dynamics—low engagement, unclear accountability, or slow decision-making can all signal disconnects. Lastly, ask if teams understand how their work impacts the overall product. If they don't, it's likely a sign that silos are forming and alignment is slipping. If discussing isn’t enough here are some hands-on exercises that could help identify these symptoms:

• Shadowing Across Teams: Pair members from different teams to shadow each other for a day. This helps reveal communication gaps, misaligned priorities, and where collaboration may be breaking down.
• "Silo Spotlight": Host a session where each team lists the challenges they face in delivering value. This can highlight where teams are unaware of how their work impacts others or where collaboration is lacking.
• Feedback Speed Test: Analyze a recent decision or project and trace how long it took for feedback to travel between teams. Delays can signal communication bottlenecks and a lack of alignment.
• Cross-Team Role Swap: Organize a short-term role swap between departments. Any confusion or misunderstandings that arise during this exercise can indicate gaps in understanding the broader product vision.
• Signal to Noise Ratio Exercise: Ask each team to list the most valuable information they receive from other teams and the least helpful. This highlights where communication is clear versus where it's overwhelming or irrelevant.

Applying Targeted Strategies

Once these symptoms are identified, the next step is to apply targeted strategies in a structured way to address them. The approach follows three key steps:

1. Ask: Use the "5 Whys" method to dig deep into the symptoms and identify the root cause of the issue. Why are teams disengaged? Why do silos exist? 
2. Collaborate: Don’t allow conversations about problems to happen in silos. Instead, bring together cross-functional teams to collaboratively answer these questions. The idea is to avoid one-off complaints and instead foster collective ownership of the solution.
3. Change: Implement small, iterative changes based on the root causes identified. These don’t need to be wide-scale shifts but focused, manageable adjustments that can be tested and refined over time.

Applying the Approach Across the SDLC

This approach can be applied at various stages of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). Here are three specific examples where the "Ask, Collaborate, Change" strategy can drive real improvement:

Enhance Communication During Discovery

During the discovery phase, teams often struggle with a lack of value-driven prioritization—they fail to focus on the most impactful requirements for the end user, leading to misaligned goals. To address this:

• Ask: Why aren’t we prioritizing features based on value? This might uncover issues such as unclear communication channels or misalignment between business and technical teams.
• Collaborate: Bring cross-functional teams together—product managers, developers, and stakeholders—to answer these questions. This is not about airing grievances but about creating a unified approach to prioritize the backlog.
• Change: Implement small, iterative adjustments to the discovery process. This could involve more inclusive meetings that ensure key stakeholders are engaged early or setting up feedback loops that continuously check if the work aligns with user value.

Create Shared Ownership During Product Builds

A common symptom during product builds is that the roadmap feels too linear and doesn’t incorporate feedback effectively. When feedback isn’t considered, teams can fall into rigid execution plans that fail to adapt to new information. To address this:

• Ask: Why isn’t our roadmap adaptable to new insights? Questions here might reveal that decision-making is isolated or that roles and responsibilities are unclear.
• Collaborate: Gather the product and engineering teams to collectively refine the roadmap. This stage is about fostering a culture of shared ownership, where team members feel responsible for the product's success and are open to adjusting the plan as necessary.
• Change: A small change might be implementing more frequent roadmap reviews with input from all teams – feature, data, site reliability, analytics, design, business, and product teams. These sessions could highlight new perspectives and allow the roadmap to evolve iteratively rather than following a rigid, top-down approach.

Reinvigorate Innovation After Product Launches

After a successful product launch, a frequent issue is a lack of goals or energy to keep pushing innovation forward. Teams often lose momentum once the MVP is delivered, falling into routine execution without fresh ideas. To counter this:

• Ask: Where has the energy gone post-launch? This might expose that teams don’t have a clear vision for the next phase, or that they feel stuck in a maintenance mindset without room for innovation.
• Collaborate: Reconnect the team with the product’s long-term vision. Together, revisit the goals and discuss strategies to reignite creativity and experimentation, potentially exploring new approaches like a dual-track agile style.
• Change: Implement a small process change, such as dedicating a portion of the team’s capacity to experimentation or prototyping. This can give teams the space to explore new features, test new tools such as leveraging an AI agent, or experiment with customer engagement strategies.
  
  A new option here is to use AI tools to streamline process improvements by analyzing workflows, identifying inefficiencies, and predicting bottlenecks. AI-driven insights can help prioritize tasks, optimize resources, and ensure feedback loops are managed effectively, enabling faster and more precise implementation of changes.

No matter which symptoms you encounter—whether it's a misalignment in priorities, isolated decision-making, or stagnation after a launch—the "Ask, Collaborate, Change" approach can help. By consistently asking the right questions, fostering cross-team collaboration, and making small, iterative adjustments, you can effectively address these challenges and keep your teams aligned, engaged, and continuously improving throughout the SDLC.

Why Product Mindset is Critical

At its heart, the product mindset is a user-centric approach that values outcomes over outputs. It builds strong relationships between product and engineering, fosters innovation, and leads to better organizational performance.

According to the 2023 State of DevOps Report, teams with a strong product mindset and focus on users saw 40% higher organizational performance. This isn’t just about delivering software faster; it’s about ensuring that what gets delivered truly serves the user’s needs. Plus, embracing a product mindset creates a more inclusive and engaging work environment which is a pretty nice side effect.

By adopting a product mindset, organizations can transcend the limitations of traditional agile frameworks and create stronger, more unified teams. The goal is to assess, apply targeted strategies, and continually refine team dynamics for a more successful product delivery process.