How Engineering Managers Should Think About Product Strategy
Engineering managers who understand product strategy make better technical decisions, build stronger teams, and advance faster than those who treat it as someone else's job.
When I ask engineering managers to describe their relationship to product strategy, I hear a consistent answer: “That’s the PM’s job. I focus on the technical work.”
This answer is understandable. Engineering management already has a wide scope — hiring, performance, architecture, process, culture, delivery. Adding “product strategy” to that list feels like scope creep.
But I want to challenge the framing. Product strategy is not something that sits separate from engineering management and occasionally intersects it. For engineers building B2B software, product strategy is embedded in technical decisions every day. The question is not whether engineering managers are engaging with it — they always are — but whether they are engaging with it thoughtfully.
How Product Strategy Shows Up in Technical Decisions
Consider a few decisions that look purely technical:
“Should we build this as a synchronous API call or an asynchronous job?”
The technical choice depends on user experience (immediate feedback vs. delayed processing) and reliability requirements. The right answer depends on your product’s positioning — are you competing on real-time data freshness, or is eventual consistency acceptable to your market? That is a product strategy question.
“How much configurability should we build into the data model?”
A narrow model is faster to build and easier to maintain in the short term. A configurable model serves enterprise customers better and enables faster customization. The choice depends on your go-to-market strategy: are you moving upmarket? Are enterprise customers a priority? Product strategy question.
“Should we build this integration or recommend a third-party tool?”
The build vs. buy decision depends on whether the integration is core to your product value proposition or peripheral to it. If your product competes on workflow automation, a native integration may be differentiating. If it is a compliance utility, recommending a third-party may be better. Product strategy question.
Each of these is framed as a technical decision. Each is actually a product-technical decision — and the engineering manager who understands the product strategy will make a better call than one who treats these as purely technical choices.
What EMs Get Wrong Without Product Strategy Awareness
Optimizing for the wrong timescale.
Without product strategy context, engineering managers often default to local optimization: the technically best solution for the current problem. But “best” depends on what you are optimizing for. A solution that is elegant for a product that will stay in its current market segment may be the wrong choice if the company is planning to move upmarket in 18 months.
Under-communicating architectural constraints to product.
When engineering managers do not engage with product strategy, they sometimes allow architectural decisions to be made that significantly constrain future product direction — without making those constraints visible to product leadership in time to influence them.
The inverse is also true: product decisions that create architectural technical debt can be prevented or mitigated if the engineering manager is engaged enough in product thinking to raise the concern proactively.
Misaligning team motivation.
Engineers are motivated by solving meaningful problems. “We’re building X feature for a customer who asked for it” is a weaker motivational frame than “we’re making it possible for HR teams to onboard 100 employees in the time it currently takes to onboard 10, which is the thing that makes us worth renewing.”
EMs who understand the product strategy can give their teams the meaningful context that transforms feature work into mission work. This matters for retention, for quality, and for the discretionary effort that separates good teams from great ones.
The EM’s Specific Role in Product Strategy
This is not about EMs taking over product decisions. It is about EMs engaging productively with product strategy as a collaborative input.
Specifically:
Surface technical constraints before they become crises. An EM who understands the product roadmap can identify architectural issues that need to be resolved before certain features are buildable. Raising these concerns six months in advance is a strategic contribution. Raising them two weeks before launch is a fire drill.
Evaluate build trade-offs in strategic context. When the team is deciding between technical approaches, bring the product strategy lens explicitly. “Given that we’re trying to move upmarket, which of these approaches gives us the configurability we’ll need in 18 months?” This changes the decision criteria.
Bring usage data back to product. Engineering teams often have unique visibility into how the product is actually used — through logs, monitoring, and infrastructure insights. EMs who synthesize this data and share it with product are generating strategic intelligence. Most do not do this systematically.
Advocate for strategic technical investments. Engineering managers who understand product strategy can make compelling arguments for technical work that serves the strategy: “If we’re going to compete on real-time data sync, we need to address this database architecture before we start building the features that depend on it.” This is not scope creep. It is technical stewardship in service of product goals.
How to Build Product Strategy Fluency
If you are an engineering manager who wants to develop deeper product strategy fluency, a few practices that work:
Attend customer calls and read customer feedback regularly. Not to learn what features to build — that is not your job — but to develop direct intuition about what problems your customers are trying to solve. This context makes product strategy reasoning much more concrete.
Read your company’s business model actively. Who are your best customers? What makes them sticky? What makes customers churn? Where does growth come from? Understanding the economics of your business sharpens product thinking considerably.
Ask the PM “why” one level deeper than you usually would. Not to challenge, but to understand. “Why is this the priority this quarter?” followed by “and why does that matter more than X?” This is not questioning the decision — it is building the context that makes your technical judgment more calibrated.
The best engineering managers I have worked with are not narrowly technical. They are technically excellent and strategically engaged. They bring their engineering perspective to product conversations, and they bring product context to engineering decisions. That combination is rare and exceptionally valuable — and it is entirely learnable.