What are the biggest collaboration challenges between Product and Eng teams?
As a PM at Lyft and now building a tool to help PMs and engineers collaborate better with each other and other stakeholders, I’ve seen firsthand how difficult alignment, documentation, and decision-making can be. Curious—what’s been your biggest challenge working across Product and Engineering while building and aligning on documentation, and what has actually worked for you?"
Replies
@marc__milberg alignment between Product and Eng is like herding caffeinated cats. Clear docs and decision-making frameworks help, but let’s be real—regular syncs and actually listening to each other matters more than another Notion doc no one reads. I've seen so much get lost with even the most organised teams because the team just doesn't care for each other and each other's goals. Team building is huge.
On an unrelated but entirely related note, I just launched Raven, a sadist productivity app for writers. Unlike most PMs, it wants you to suffer.
@bradharrs that's a pretty awesome pitch. Love the web copy, too.
@steveb appreciate it! Would love some feedback on our launch page if you have a moment
@bradharrs Agreed that team building is super important and regular syncs with technical stakeholders are also incredibly important. In my experience though, the source of truth for building initiatives are always going to come down to the documentation. I understand that startups are much more scrappy in nature and documentation can often fall into the back seat, but that is also not an optimal scenario or else teams will be reliant upon verbal conversations over clear documentation that is aligned upon.
At Lyft, we put in a lot of effort to make sure that Product, Eng, Legal, Sales, PMM, etc are all aligned on the documentation of the initiatives that we're prioritizing. But often there is a level of ambiguity of what is and is not approved, even after doc collaboration.
I'll check out Raven!
Product Hunt
This is a pretty broad question and it really depends on the team size and phase. Can you share a bit more about what you're building, so I can give a little bit more precise insights?
There's always a tension between documentation that works well for product and design ideation vs. documentation that works well for execution. It's always difficult to keep documentation fresh. I've seen an interesting approach to solving this with @Guru , where they had a sort of freshness score or decay score. But since Guru, I'm not sure I've seen anything that radically helps keep information fresh. I'm curious how you're slicing the problem!
@rajiv_ayyangar Definitely.
We're building @Artefact, which helps mid-size & enterprise product and eng teams with a purpose built documentation solution so there is no guesswork around cross functional approvals. In my experience, I've always found a level of ambiguity around who has actually approved docs and when. Although we do have other doc related improvements in comparison to Google Docs, such as native AI integrations for doc building and unique doc insights across individual, team, and org collaboration, the meat of our differentiation lives around our CRM functionality for approvals. And we're planning on making it even more granular to the section level instead of the overall doc level.
That is also interesting with @Guru on the freshness score. I will definitely check that out.
Product Hunt
@marc__milberg These aren't exactly approval-related, but three other doc models that I thought were interesting for collaboration were @Almanac by Adam Nathan, @quip (one of the first products I discovered on product hunt! combined chat and documents), and @Dropbox Paper (which, while it wasn't as expressive as Notion, was really great at and designed for team collaboration).
@rajiv_ayyangar Thanks for sharing I'll definitely check them out as well!
Not everyone participates with the same level of enthusiasm. Because of this, even when we have meetings, the understanding and alignment vary from person to person. This makes decision-making difficult.
Actively communicating and understanding each other's tasks, time requirements, and goals can help solve these issues.
@kay_arkain Do you notice that within smaller startups or more mature orgs?
@marcmilberg Great question! Since you’re building a tool to help with these challenges, what have you noticed as the biggest pain points in getting tech documentation approved or aligning teams? Are there common roadblocks or gaps you’ve seen that make the process harder for PMs and engineers?
honestly I don't think there's a universal answer and it depends from team to team, I've seen a lot of eng really hating on daily scrums/standups but honestly I think that's what keeps me on track however just going "I'm still working on x" shouldn't be enough and it should be more like "I was working on x, implementing y feature and ran into z problem. Will look into a solution into z problem and hopefully will get x done by ___" but that's just me! Definitely play around with different approaches and see what works best for your team!
@alan_rivera Yea it's definitely fluid in terms of how to approach Product and Eng team alignment. Separate from daily scrums/standups, do you use documentation as part of your process? How does that play a role?
The way of conveying idea with feasible & structured manner display all the necessary actions that should be taken positively by the Engineering team to make it happen. At times SOPs created` in order to complete CTAs to help both teams to work collaborative efforts for conclusive actions and results to be as per planned.
One big challenge is keeping documentation up to date—things move fast, and outdated info causes misalignment. Clear, structured communication Best Pinch Clips and a single source of truth (like Notion or Confluence) help a lot.