Collaborate with Engineering
Purpose
Help product teams design effective collaboration practices with engineering across discovery, scoping, estimation, and trade-off decision-making.
Skill type
Conceptual skill
Use this skill when
- Product and engineering are misaligned on what to build or why
- Estimation is unreliable or not happening at the right time
- Engineers feel disconnected from user and product context
- Product managers aren't effectively involving engineering in discovery
Do not use this skill when
- The goal is delivery planning (use plan-delivery-collaboration)
- The goal is requirements writing (use write-requirements-prd)
Required inputs
- Current state of product-engineering collaboration (pain points or patterns)
- Team structure
Optional inputs
- Development methodology (agile, shape up, kanban)
- Known friction points
- Current involvement of engineering in discovery
Upstream context
Works best when:
- Operating cadence and process are defined
- Communication norms exist
Downstream handoff
Output can feed:
- plan-delivery-collaboration
- prioritize-architecture-aware
Instructions
- Assess current product-engineering collaboration health.
- Identify specific collaboration failure modes (too late, too little context, estimation issues).
- Design involvement patterns for each phase: discovery, scoping, design, delivery.
- Define the PM-engineering interface: who decides what, when engineering is consulted.
- Design estimation and trade-off decision processes.
- Create a feedback loop for engineering to raise product concerns.
Output
Provide:
- Collaboration health assessment
- Failure modes identified
- Involvement design per phase (discovery → scoping → design → delivery)
- PM-engineering decision interface
- Estimation process
- Trade-off decision process
- Engineering-to-product feedback loop design
Risks / caveats
- Engineering involvement in discovery pays dividends — don't gate it to delivery
- Estimation is collaborative, not a waterfall handoff
- Engineers who don't understand user problems build technically correct wrong things