Will Larson: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay. Shifting topics. There's a lot of product managers that listen to this. Something PMs often wonder is how to have better relationships with their engineers, their eng managers. What advice could you give to product managers to build more productive happy relationships with their engineers and eng managers? So the core problem, and most of the EM PM peers that I've worked on... There's two core problems. So one, sometimes the incentives are misaligned and that's hard to navigate, but if you can just be honest with each other and understand the incentives, sometimes you can find a compromise, but sometimes the EMs and PMs will be misaligned because just their incentives are so far apart that there's no way to get to the bottom of it. And so this might be timeline related or saying yes to sales related. Or the engineer is like, "Hey, we definitely can't say yes to that." And the PMs are like, "Actually, we're going to say yes to it because really important for me getting promoted," or something like that. Is it ever this simple? It's really never that simple. People create simplistic narratives to find villains that they work with. There are no villains in the workplace. They're just people with complex incentives that are doing complex things. But sometimes I talk to EMs who think, "Oh, the product manager is just saying yes because they want to get promoted because the salesperson will review their promotion or something." The reality is never as simple. The reality is the business needs to sell stuff to remain functioning. You can't just say no and have the business succeed. That doesn't work either. So one, understanding the incentives. The other piece though, and I think this is the more common case or just that the EM or the PM just don't understand the other person's needs and they start arguing before understanding. So my biggest advice to both the EMs and the PMs, is before you try to solve the conflict, it's like pushing to ship this feature, pushing to change the approach. Just make sure you actually understand what they care about. There is this idea that you have to make trade-offs and that there are tons of hard trade-offs to be made in the field, but my experience is if you really deeply understand what everyone wants, there's usually a compromised solution that gives everyone exactly what they want. That doesn't take more time. You just have to be willing to dig deeper into it and understand the true needs for each party, which is often not what they're saying by the way, which is part of the confusion. On the incentives piece, is there anything you've seen work to fix that problem? Because if PM performance reviews are based on impact engineering, performance reviews are based on interesting projects or uptime, do you just work to change those ladder definitions? What actually can help that situation?…

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