Developers are Essential in every Product Manager's Success

A Product Manager's success is directly tied with the health of his/her relationship with the engineering team.

I have yet to witness a PM that drove product success while having a shaky bond with tech. Although I came from a CS background myself, I still had to build that relationship by making adjustments & being patient.

Without empathy for your engineering unit, you won't be able to drive much influence & win the support you need.

Now, I've picked up on several things (sometimes the hard way) that damage a PM's rapport with developers. I guess an engineer could give more insights, but let me share some pointers with you.

Devs simply hate it when PMs:
1. Make frequent updates in an ongoing sprint.
2. Explain the feature & edge cases but skip the "Why?"
3. Dismiss technical debt as unnecessary.
4. Skimp on documentation/wireframes.
5. Plan to deliver the final HTML in the middle of the active sprint.
6. Force the team to deliver all stories vs. prioritizing/triage.
7. Spec overly complex features with no major upside.
8. Constantly move developers to another task when the previous one is still incomplete.
9. Refer to a competitor site & ask them to 'just copy it'.
10. Trivialize requirements without acknowledging the complexity behind the scenes.