In nearly 25 years of building products, one pattern has repeated itself over and over again.
Engineering teams and product teams locked in constant conflict.
It usually starts small an engineer pushing back on unclear requirement, a product manager escalating a missed deadline but soon, it spirals into chronic tension. Every new feature feels like a battle. Communication breakdowns become the norm. Trust erodes.
Most leaders try to solve this with:
- New project management frameworks
- Agile or Scrum process training
- Team reorganizations
- Managing the tension between teams
But the root problem isn’t just personality clashes or lack of communication.
It’s misaligned incentives.
At most companies, engineering is rewarded for technical excellence — clean code, system performance, architectural integrity. Product teams, on the other hand, are evaluated on delivery — shipping features fast, hitting roadmap milestones, and speed to market.
You’ve basically designed conflict into your business operating system.
We Learned This the Hard Way
At ISHIR, we’ve built custom software products for over two decades, working with both fast-moving bold startups, local mid-market businesses and global enterprises. We’ve seen the same pattern unfold in countless organizations, including our own.
Through years of iteration, trial, and reflection, we discovered that fixing this tension requires going upstream — aligning both teams around the same goal and common KPI.
Here’s what’s worked for us:
1. Make Customer Impact the North Star Metric
Instead of measuring success in silos, we started defining shared success around customer outcomes — usability, adoption rate, churn rate, renewal rates, NPS, and ROI.
When engineers see how their code directly impacts real users, and PMs focus on value creation instead of feature count, collaboration naturally improves.
2. Share Business Context with Engineering
Too often, engineers are handed tickets with very little context. We flipped that. Product managers now bring engineers into early discovery conversations during innovation acceleration workshop or discovery sprints. Engineers contribute to technical feasibility, risk, and even design trade-offs.
This builds trust and co-ownership.
3. Reward Cross-Functional Collaboration
We revised performance reviews to reward joint problem-solving and collaborative wins. When product and engineering teams solve tough challenges together, both get credit and both WIN.
The result? Engineers now propose creative, customer-centric solutions. Product managers become more receptive to technical constraints. Tension gives way to partnership.
Redesigning Your Business Operating System, Not Just Your Product Development Process
If your product and engineering teams are clashing, look at how you’re measuring and rewarding success.
Your operating system is perfectly designed to deliver the results you’re already getting.
Start with aligned incentives. Build from there.
Need help fixing product-engineering misalignment in your software team?
At ISHIR, we help organizations accelerate innovation by aligning strategy, stakeholders, product teams, and execution — starting with clarity. Whether you’re scaling your product or reimagining your tech stack, we bring a proven innovation and development methodology to help you move faster without friction.
Bridge the Gap Between Product & Engineering
At ISHIR, we accelerate innovation by aligning strategy, teams, and execution.
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