Close enough collaboration between product and engineering is crucial.
This sounds easy, but can be incredibly difficult to achieve.
We see often teams separated using an activity based approach.
This leads to frustrations and frictions between :
- developers : those who design and implement solutions
- product managers and designer: those who design and validate solutions.
Oups, there is obviously a common activity here: "design solutions".
Thus to reduce frictions we might collaborate during this common step to align understanding, agree faster on what can be done, and eliminate wasteful thinking and tasks.
Include your architects "as soon as possible" during brainstorming sessions, when meeting clients to hear and understand the problem, whenever you start searching for a solution.
This leads to an "outcome oriented" approach.
A target based collaboration is more suitable for startups, scaleups and companies in need for iterative learning and producing software in general.
More about it in first comment :)