Rob Grady

In my previous post I commented on the segregation challenge that faces product management and the development team. It isn’t uncommon to find execs, engineers and other process freaks trying to put everything in a little box but in an effort to optimize the world, you often overlook the benefits of collaboration and creativity.
One ’school of thought’ has the product management team handing requirements to the development team without regard to implementation. Many developers and IT executives prefer the ‘toss over the fence’ since they don’t want anyone (especially business folks) dictating how they do their job. And, in all fairness, the business folks often start discussing database implications when they should be focusing on defining the business rules and requirements. Moreover most business folks don’t have the specialized expertise nor time to define schemas.

I’ve been heard to say on more than one occasion, that I don’t care if it runs on cheese as long as it works. The purpose of that statement is to keep the business team focused on business problems and help them drive the solution by defining the requirements, user experience and business rules. With that said, product management still needs to be cognizant of implementation details since they will often be constrained by them later.

In a perfect world, technical decisions made today would have little bearing on functional options tomorrow. Unfortunately, in practice, that’s not true and we find the ‘NO” response from development is rooted in a technical decision made previously. Long-view thinking in technical architecture is required to scale. ‘Tossing over the Fence’ does not provide context for the long-term decision making but there are some things product management can do to overcome the disconnect.

While there is no silver bullet, a collaborative and evangelistic ‘tell-all’ strategy can help. By defining, posting, sharing, and discussing a long-term roadmap, product management can help overcome the segregation challenges. A roadmap that outlines the laundry list of business objectives and corresponding functionality gives way to discussion across organizational barriers.

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