Reduce friction & create better alignment between product & engineering w/ Hubert Palan #149

Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ Product Board, discusses how to achieve successful collaboration between product and eng teams! He addresses the elements that make up healthy collaboration, common areas of tension between product & eng, and steps for aligning the teams on product vision, tooling, and processes. We also cover strategies for engineering leaders who want to contribute more to their business’s product vision, facilitation frameworks to improve communication between product management & eng teams, and how to best advocate for engineering’s most important considerations.

ABOUT HUBERT PALAN

Hubert Palan is Founder and CEO of Productboard. Driven by a passion for building truly excellent products, he started the company when he saw a hole in the market for a dedicated product management platform. Before Productboard, Hubert was VP of Product Management at GoodData and a management consultant at Accenture. Hubert mentors and advises startups and judges teams at entrepreneurship competitions and frequently speaks at his two alma maters – UC Berkeley, where he got his MBA, and the Czech Technical University, where he received an MSc. in Computer Science.

"When the engineering partner would come to the conversation talking about how other products that are successful have approached that and what choices they made, as opposed to just talking about the technology in the abstract, the business aspect of it, how it helped drive business results for other companies that are in similar markets or adjacent spaces, t hat's something that's super valuable because it shows that you are thinking about the technology, just not for the love of technology, but in the business context and in the appreciation of how the technology decisions drive the business outcomes.”

- Hubert Palan   

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SHOW NOTES:

• Elements that contribute to successful collaboration between product & eng (2:34)
• Tools for understanding customer demographics & behavior (4:50)
• Greatest areas of friction between engineering and product (8:11)
• How to determine who is driving what initiative (11:03)
• Tactics for splitting responsibilities between EMs, PMs, tech leads, etc. (13:03)
• Hubert’s favorite tooling techniques (15:39)
• Strategies for aligning eng & product management processes (17:51)
• Frameworks for developing product vision & breaking it down into steps (19:27)
• Solving friction points between existing & new customers (23:16)
• How eng leaders can get involved with the product vision side of the business (24:28)
• Handling conflicting priorities & misalignment between teams (27:42)
• Tips for successful communication between product & eng (29:16)
• Advocate for engineering’s most important considerations (31:32)
• Specific conversations for facilitating communication between eng & PM teams (34:32)
• Steps to ensure engineers are involved in defining product vision / strategy (37:27)
• Rapid fire questions (40:55)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

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This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/