Describing Your Working Model With Engineering Partners as a PM

How do you work with engineering? Walk through the working model you use with engineers, both day to day and across a product's life cycle. ```hint Make the model concrete Anchor it in a real team: what you decide, what the engineering lead decides, which rituals you show up to, and one moment when that arrangement was put under strain. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Should I describe the model I use on my current team, or how it has changed across teams of different size and maturity? - Is the interest mainly in planning and prioritization, the build phase, or how disagreements with engineers get resolved? - Should the answer cover a single team, or a setup with several engineering teams and dependencies between them? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A clear split of decision rights between PM and engineering (problem and priority versus approach and estimates) and how shared calls on scope get made - The concrete rhythms and artifacts used through discovery, planning, build and launch, and how early engineers get involved - How technical debt, reliability work and engineer-proposed ideas earn time on the roadmap - A specific example where the model was tested, such as a disagreement or a slipped estimate, and what changed afterwards - How the model adapts to team seniority, size, or a platform team versus a user-facing one ### Follow-up Questions - Tell me about a time an engineering lead strongly disagreed with your priority. What happened? - How do you decide how much of a quarter goes to technical debt, and who makes that call? - What would engineers who have worked with you say you should do differently?