The perfect harmony
Structuring the relationship between product and engineering management
When I first started working in tech, one of the biggest puzzles was figuring out the best way for product managers (PMs) and engineering managers (EMs) to collaborate. Over the years, I have seen a few different setups, each with its own flavor and quirks. Let’s walk through them.
The lone EM setup
This is actually a setup where the PM does’n exist. In smaller companies, it is not uncommon that there is no PM role at all across the company. Another case is when the PM role exists, but only for the core engineering function of the company, and it is a luxury for the Data org to have PMs. In this scenario, the EM is a jack-of-all-trades, owning both execution and strategy, and working directly with stakeholders to decide what to build.
This setup can work well when resources are limited, and it is a very formative experience for the EM because it forces them to think more strategically about value and impact, and avoid building something just because it involves a cool tech stack. However, it does put a lot of pressure on the EM, and inevitably it limits the scope of what the team can achieve.
The one-to-one partnership
In this scenario, the PM and EM form a tight-knit pair, sharing responsibility for the team’s success. This setup favors people first, in the sense that the PM oversees the entire team portfolio (or part of it), rather than owning a cross-functional responsibility that spans multiple teams. The EM focuses on execution, but their roles overlap significantly because they deal with the same initiatives and people (inside and outside the team).
This setup fosters strong collaboration and bonding, where PMs and EMs are not just aligned on roadmaps, but genuinely invested in each other's success. They celebrate wins together and deal with setbacks as a unit, with a shared sense of accountability. The language is not “you should fix this”, but rather “how can we solve this?”.
Over time, this “we are in this together” mindset builds a resilient, high-trust team. It’s less like two separate functions and more like a single brain with two hemispheres: one strategic, one technical, but both fundamental.
The matrix model
In a more complex or larger organization, you might find PMs working in a matrix setup, where they oversee features that span multiple teams. This setup favors function first, in the sense that for example a PM oversees a product that has several components (front-end, back-end, customer support, etc) spread across multiple teams. While this can look great on paper, and in some cases may be inevitable, it has certain drawbacks.
For one, it requires a lot of communication and alignment to work well. Also, the PM needs to connect and work well with multiple EMs. Building a well-functioning EM–PM pair is already a challenge, imagine having to do that two or three times.
But the main problem is that it is a loosely coupled setup that seems designed to maximize blame deflection and bandwagoning for the PM.
For example, if an initiative owned by one of the teams is successful, the PM can highlight the PM–team connection and take credit for the win. If the initiative is a failure, the PM might look for an escape route, by downplaying the connection with the team or even distancing themselves and throwing the engineering team under the bus, because they are only loosely attached and not "one of them". This leads to low accountability from Product, which is poisonous.
I crossed paths with a PM who was unable to say if he was the counterpart of a certain EM or not. His answers were always vague and deflecting, like “in a sense, yes” or “it depends” He was always on the fence because the engineering team was not executing well and it was not clear if the initiative he was PM-ing was going to be a success. He was keeping his options open in case an escape was needed1.
The ideal blend
In my experience, the absolute best setup is the one-to-one partnership between a PM and an EM, where the PM has a technical background (ideally an ex-engineer converted to Product), and the EM has spent some time in the lone EM setup to get exposure to strategy.
It brings the best of all worlds, Product and Engineering. A very cohesive yin-yang pair that blurs the lines between strategy and execution in the best possible way, where the PM has the technical chops to understand the nitty-gritty of execution, and the EM is not a mere execution monkey and can influence the strategy.
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This is what eventually happened, and the engineering team was stripped of their charter and repurposed to something else.