Common PM/Eng Disagreements

One of the most common questions in PM interviews is: Tell me about a disagreement with your engineering partner.

Disagreements

As I was preparing for a behavioral-heavy set of interviews, I had a good friend who is a CTO pepper me with questions, and it reminded me of a few things that engineering is looking for when they interview PMs.

Note: Most engineers dispise the average PM because they insist on setting the agenda. I have a tendancy to work closely with my engineering partner. Only a small number of my engineering partners found me frustring, most loved working with me because I truly treated them as an equal partner. The problem with this history means, I wasn’t ready for the bias most engineering parnters have around PMs.

During our discussion, I built a three-pronged framework for engineering partner discussion:

• Risk

• Cost

• Mitigation

When PMs work with Engineering partners, they need to be asking (poking):

• What are the risks with your proposed approach?

• What are the costs to build the solution as you want?

• How are we going to mitigate the risks (and reduce the costs)?

Additional concepts covered include:

• Is this New vs. Known solution?

• What are the main sticking points?