I think we need to reverse the roles or how they play out in companies in day to day life. We need other people than engineers to _ask_ for certain changes or _make suggestions_. Not a product manager, who takes ideas from other departments as law and _makes demands_ out of that for the engineers, and then by the might of their management position push the changes through.

We could be better off with for example a designer talking directly to the engineers and asking them "Can you achieve XYZ?" then the engineers thinks for a bit and then reply "We can do XY, but Z would be way more effort and not worth it at this time.". Then they decide, whether to do XY even without Z. I don't see why designers or engineers should not be capable of sitting together to come to a decision, and I don't see, how there necessarily someone needs to be involved trying to force something down the throat of engineers.

Similar for sales or marketing. They can come to the engineers, asking them: "We would like to sell feature XYZ. Are we ready for that?" then the engineers might say: "Nope, ask again next year.", instead of sales and marketing running off selling things that don't even exist yet. Then there needs to be acceptance and trust in the engineering team's competence. If that trust does not exist, we need to ask ourselves what the company is doing with such a team.

How I have come to loath the view, that engineers are like a band of little children, who will run off and go all crazy, if there is no manager ordering them around.

Some kind of overarching goals will need to be known or thought of. Those we can extract from having contact with the actual users, and from having great ideas, that we test out and get user feedback for.

In reality most engineers never have contact with the actual user in their daily job and as such, it is of course very far removed from being agile.

Just make the Designer the Product Manager, or get rid of the PM title entirely. After all, the process of navigating features and fixes to move the product forward is really a design job, not a management function. Also, the more the technical and design people understand the business side, including Marketing and Sales, the better. Ideally, technical and business sides work together, with design as the cartilage that holds them together.

I think every good experience I've had as part of a team, was because the business people, the designers, and the engineers were all respectful of each other, and had no power over one another. So I totally agree! Nothing stops that.

People always imagine every team has to be some little internal war, and I think the whole methodology-mill industry is built around that belief. People CAN'T compromise or work together, or at least we can't bet on that, so here's some process. That rubs me the wrong way. It's pretty patronizing, you're right that it's like treating engineers like children.

> Similar for sales or marketing. They can come to the engineers, asking them: "We would like to sell feature XYZ. Are we ready for that?" then the engineers might say: "Nope, ask again next year.",

This is a totally respectful conversation with understanding on both sides. I might want to just make sure that the engineer in this scenario would be open to:

    Marketer: "Feature XYZ is going to make a massive impact if we could get it with some clients this year before competitor X. Even feature XY without Z would beat their offering. What do you think?"


    Engineer: "Ah yeah, I can see how that would be a really good advantage to have. I think XY might still be a bit hard to hit for EoY with the quality requirements we have, do you know precisely what they're planning?"


    Marketer: "They are really only shipping feature X for the first month I think. No screenshots of Y in their announcement. Being the first mover would be good, even without Y."


    Engineer: "We can make X happen, easy."