3 Ways Including Engineers Improves Product Development

Engineering teams often ask to be brought in earlier in the product development process. Here are 3 ways you can include engineers in your product development process to increase velocity, reduce rework down the road, and boost morale on your teams:

Start at the beginning by inviting engineers to brainstorming sessions

It may be that your team is brand new to the feature set you own, brand new to the product you’re working on, or even brand new to the company entirely. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a wealth of knowledge and experience to draw from. Giving everyone on the team an opportunity to propose solutions to a problem allows those with experience solving similar problems to talk through what has worked in the past, and can help you avoid coming up with things that seem simple enough, but end up being overly complex to build.

Reach out frequently for engineering feedback during design and product iteration

You’ve got your initial ideas set, and now it’s time to go through the cycle of designing things out, getting feedback, and tweaking those designs until you have something everyone is happy with. The problem is most of the time there aren’t any engineers giving any feedback during this phase. The more information your engineers have about the direction things are moving in, the better they can help the team avoid pitfalls like designing for data that isn’t available, having to build custom components when there is something that already exists and does the same thing, etc.

Understand that design and product iteration isn’t done once engineers start building

“Here are the finalized designs and product requirements. We’re targeting launch in 2 sprints, so let’s get to work!”

The classic case of just throwing it over the wall and letting the engineering team figure it out. This is not how software development works. As engineers build things they may come across areas of the code that are cumbersome and need some rework before they can fulfill requirements. They may discover that some data they need isn’t actually available, which means they won’t be able to do the thing they’re being asked to do. This is where staying in constant communication with your team throughout the process is important. You engineers should be able to raise the flag on issues they encounter, and work with their product and design partners to come up with a solution that still accomplishes what is needed without blowing up the scope of the whole project.

Including the full team throughout the product development process is essential. Doing so will help you avoid disaster later on, it will help you hit your targets, and most importantly it will keep your team happy and healthy so they can continue solving difficult problems and building great software.