What would we build if we had three months left?

The relationship between PMs and Engineering teams has always been a delicate dance. But, when these two teams work together effectively, incredible products can be built.

This week, Zabrina Hossain, VP of Product Management at UScreen, shares insights into aligning product and engineering teams, how to improve focus and build what is important, and finding the balance between addressing tech debt and building new products. 

Zabrina dives into the methodologies she has used at Shopify, Wealthsimple, and UScreen to bring these critical teams together to improve the build process. If you’re an engineering leader or even a developer who has some friction with your PM, this episode can give you some important insights into how you streamline your development process from end to end.

Join as we discuss: 

• How to align product and engineering teams
• Improving focus and building what's important
• Finding the balance between cleaning up tech debt and building new products 

How to align product and engineering teams

Hossain’s entry into UScreen was made simple by preceding leadership choices which, she noticed, came predominantly from the Shape Up framework.

The framework equips teams with specific language and techniques they can use to address areas of uncertainty along the entire product development journey.

She found an opportunity to further optimize the operation when she realized the framework was being implemented in a fragmented way:

• Some people would operate with a two-week planning cycle while others used a six-week interval
• This created blind spots for anyone wanting to understand the overall progress of a development project

Leveraging the Shape Up framework for a smoother transition, Hossain introduced a standardized six-week cycle.

Within the first cycle of implementation, benefits were evident. Trusting that bug fixes and optimization would occur before the next major discussion point allowed everyone to divide and conquer more effectively.

Strengthen foundations with effective project briefs

Although less is more, there should still be an effort to provide details when necessary.

“Pitches were short and direct, which was good, but we added more detail to articulating the problem and the opportunity,” Hossain says.

This allowed for a clearer focus on the pain point of the content creator as the end user of UScreen, and agreement on what kind of outcome a solution would need to provide.

Project briefs grew more effective for Hossain’s teams once they defined what the treasure was and where it was buried, rather than defining the journey to get there — that part was up to the respective development teams.

Enable collaboration

This is a major challenge for businesses with remote staff scattered across different time zones, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.

Give your employees the tools and support they need to share information, context and varied perspectives with one another. This includes thinking time and space to let ideas percolate before being expanded upon organically at a later stage. 

“What would we build if we had three months left?”

That’s one surefire way to bring the important things into perspective, right?

Hossain agrees, “I think any team can use that, regardless of the framework on which they’re operating.”

The never-ending dance of business is to balance the immediate returns with the longer-term strategic view, and sometimes a catalyst is needed to shift our thinking from one target to the other.

Improving focus and building what's important

Clear and effective communication is a must.

Hossain’s approach to tweaking the Shape Up method clarifies the problem, the desired outcome and the metrics that signal progress.

Everyone working on the project can revisit the project brief to refresh their memories and restore focus.

With a six-week interval, there’s room for a systematic review and discussion around what is being done and why, what value is needed by the end user in the context of that point in time and what the team’s response will be to the process of delivering that value.

Simply put — it is the perfect blend of structure and flexibility.

Familiarity enables efficiency

It’s another simple truth that underpins Hossain’s transformational work.

By using a template for sharing information, she ensures that everyone:

• Knows what to expect
• Knows how to process the information
• Understands their respective responsibilities
• Knows how to handle emerging issues
• Holds awareness of ‘emergency contacts’ in the team

Creating familiarity through the template creates stability within the operation.

Are you asking the right questions?

Shift your mind toward outcomes and results that you want to create with your available resources.

Hossain went the extra mile, sharing these guiding questions that you can use to help set appropriate priorities within your to-do list:

• Why are we building this?
• What does this do for our customer, the content creator?
• How is it helping our customer?
• How does helping our customer this way help our business?

The right metrics help you measure your progress, which is why choosing what to measure is important. Context enhances the quality and value of the metric being observed.

“If you’re building something to help creators attract more comments, are you considering there may be an increase in negative comments which could affect the creator’s revenue?” Hossain says.

Finding the balance between cleaning up tech debt and building new products 

Once again, context wins.

Think about it like a child: when a baby is born, a certain size of clothing fits. The child outgrows those clothes over time.

This is exactly how your business will function concerning technology.

Sometimes you will need to invest heavily for that growth spurt or special occasion and at other times you can get by with hand-me-downs. In a purely business context, this may look like legacy software. 

Ultimately, according to Hossain, to find success you must live beyond the boundaries of the task list, concentrate on the value and purpose of everything being done and stabilize the right elements to bring greater efficiency without sacrificing quality.

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Need more insight on aligning teams for ultimate product development success? Listen to the full episode to learn more about how OpsLevel has made those decisions over time and what you can take from our lessons learned.

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