[amirathi]

Best thing you can do is to bring customer problems to engineers & come up with solutions together. Far too many PMs create detailed spec documents (solutions) on their own and throw it over the wall to engineers.

Benefits of this approach,

1. Engineers get to know more about the customers & their pain points first hand.

2. Engineers are bought into the solution as they co-created it.

3. You usually come up with better solutions as both business and technical constraints are all on the table.

[Daktest]

Great points! What would you do in situations where your engineers aren't all that interested in customer conversations?

In the past, I've tried to bring in our engineers to user interview/feedback sessions or customer meetings, but most of them didn't seem that interested in coming again.

[amirathi]

In that case, I would frame the conversation as a problem solving session. You can do the legwork of customer inputs, cross team talk, management buy-in etc. And once you zero in on the problem (and have it prioritised) just talk to engineer and together brainstorm the ways to solve it.