“My engineer told me, ‘It’s not my job to challenge product decisions.’ He was right. And it was my job to fix it.”
If you want product-oriented engineers, you need more than a pep talk about “ownership.” You need to change the system.
I used to believe sharing the roadmap in a kickoff was enough. I was wrong. Every time I handed down finished specs, I locked my engineers out of the product. It wasn’t that they lacked initiative; they lacked context. And when someone did push back, I’d see it as friction, not feedback.
That’s not how you build real product teams. You get there by making context the default. By turning specs into a starting point, not the finish line. By making “why” louder than “how.” And by repeating this: The best engineering value happens before the first line of code.
Now, I owe it to my team to surface all the messy background—tradeoffs, customer pain, business goals. I owe it to my PMs to make this a two-way conversation. When an engineer “challenges” a product decision, I don’t hear attitude—I hear a signal, a chance to build something better.
If your engineers seem checked out on product, don’t call them out. Call yourself out. Change the environment. The rest follows.