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Never Surprise Your Engineering Partner
Never surprise your engineering partner. Before you make a material commitment to a customer or the CEO, align explicitly with your engineering and design leaders. Agree on the outcome you're committing to, what you'll move or stop to make room, and which assumptions still need testing. Product may lead on vision and strategy, but decisions about how to deploy teams and what to promise the business should be made together. Make the tradeoffs visible, settle who decides what, and leave room to challenge an assumption before it turns into a commitment your teams have to deliver. For a leader new to the top product role, this builds the working agreement your teams will depend on. Over seven years leading product at Lucid, it's how we never missed a customer commitment.
Never surprise your engineering partner.
A customer wants a delivery date. The CEO wants a commitment. Either answer affects engineering capacity, other priorities, and work we have already promised.
How do you assure you never miss a commitment?
I have a simple rule with the engineering and design leaders I work with: we align before making a material commitment.
That alignment needs to be explicit.
What outcome are we committing to? What will we move or stop to make room? What assumptions still need to be tested?
I may lead out on vision and strategy, but my engineering and design partners strengthen that thinking and help me see blind spots. When we decide how to deploy teams or what to promise the business, we should be making those choices together.
Make the tradeoffs visible. Agree on who can make which decisions. Give each other time to challenge an assumption before it becomes a commitment your teams have to deliver.
That partnership matters when you’re new to the top product role. You are building the working agreement your teams will depend on.
This approach allowed us to never miss a customer commitment in the 7 years I led product at Lucid.
What have you and your engineering partner never explicitly agreed on?