Every language tells a story, and learning a new one can add chapters to our own. Just ask Dr. Thomas Bak.
Bak, a cognitive neuroscientist, grew up in Poland, married a partner from Spain and moved to Scotland as a researcher at the University of Edinburgh. Just as important, he now speaks Polish, Spanish and English.
Bak embraces the cognitive power of multilingualism, and in a recent study with the National Library of Medicine, he revealed that people who are proficient in two languages score higher on attention tests and have better concentration than those who only speak one.
This boost in performance can be twofold in the tech world, where product managers and software engineers often articulate themselves differently — but can improve their skills by becoming bilingual and better understanding their counterparts.
“Engineers are more analytical,” said Geoffroy Barruel, product manager at Wise. “Rather than think in boxes, they think in schemes.”
Learning and using a counterpart’s technical language can produce higher dividends for individuals and teams, with some perks going far beyond Dr. Bak’s benefits in attention and concentration.
“Foundational communication abilities and behaviors support building trust in product teams,” said Squire Product Manager Raymond Robles. “Teams with strong trust in turn craft the best experiences for their customers, their company and the world.”
Built In Austin sat down with Barruel and Robles to learn about the far-reaching benefits of bilingualsim between product managers and engineers.
As a product manager, what are the key ingredients for a successful relationship with your engineering team?
Here at Wise, there is no closer relationship than the one between a product manager and their engineers. It is vital in our organization that this relationship is built upon trust, vulnerability and even friendship. We have built a culture of feedback, which is especially true between the dynamic duo of these teams. Both PMs and engineers at Wise need to understand that there is no such thing as a dumb question. We hire both parties with the understanding of mutual support.
As a product manager at Wise, this relationship consists of asking the right probing questions, being empathic of the things you might not understand, knowing how to relay information and being vulnerable to the feedback provided by your engineers. It is the understanding that PMs and engineers will come to the table with different skill sets, but all of their various strengths come together to identify and solve the problems our customers face.
Describe how your product and engineering teams intersect, and how this organizational structure helps build the relationship between the two.
Each product manager has a dedicated team of three to eight engineers that work together throughout all of the various projects the group gets assigned. We believe that within this team they can continue to work together to solve any challenges the project might face. This creates the ability to build strong relationships without having to start over with a new team on each new project.
When we keep the team of PMs and engineers the same with each task, they are able to craft stronger relationships and learn from each other continuously. Our teams are objectively aligned, meaning they are able to focus on one scope or a specific part of the product. This is what unifies our teams — they are able to find specific areas of impact and gain depth over a certain product, thus gaining expertise in this area. We thrive on autonomy, so our teams also have the ability to branch off and solve more complex problems that arise within their group.
We are firm believers that everything is more convincing with data.”
What communication strategies do you use to ensure engineers share your product vision?
Data, data, data. Aside from, of course, ensuring that written and verbal communication is strong, providing relevant information through data has always been highly successful for our PM and engineering teams at Wise. We are firm believers that everything is more convincing with data. Engineers are more analytical — rather than thinking in boxes, they think in complex schemes. When our product managers are able to create diagrams and charts with measurable objectives backed by data, we can better articulate why a project matters to our customers and thus why it should matter to our engineers.
As a product manager, what are the key ingredients for a successful relationship with your engineering team?
Communication and trust. This may not sound unique to the product manager and product team relationship, and that’s because it isn’t.
Communication spans important activities such as relaying critical thinking, which exposes assumptions, strategies and problem statements; collaborative problem solving, which leads to more innovative solutions than an individual can typically conceive; effective written communication, which is essential to wide and asynchronous dissemination of information; leadership, which motivates and aligns teams with diverse skill sets and perspectives; and intercultural understanding, which is especially important in our global and often remote workforce.
Communicate often and early.”
Describe how your product and engineering teams intersect, and how this organizational structure helps build the relationship between the two.
A product team should interface every day. Whether you’re officially managing quality, design, engineering, projects or products, the point is to empower the team to grow together with a shared sense of accountability for the outcome.
We’ve learned that the earlier the whole team is involved in an initiative — yes, even during the research phase — the better the outcomes. For example, it’s one thing to communicate to an engineer that an inventory list is taking too long to load and needs to be optimized, and quite another for them to be personally present as a customer attempts this workflow onsite.
A product designer can guess that a customer will have a tough time finding a button that leads to a key workflow, but they will understand the scope of this friction when they watch videos of customers fumbling around a prototype for several minutes trying to find said button. The quality team can find defects in a feature just before it’s poised to go to production, and better yet, they can flag these potential defects during the low fidelity design phase and suggest alternatives.
Communicate often and early.
What communication strategies do you use to ensure engineers share your product vision?
Sharing product vision means sharing product thinking. There are a few key perspectives to internalize here.
First, love problems more than solutions; this requires the team to have the humility to know that they will be wrong often. Second, place outcomes over outputs. Rather than obsessing over checking off features from a list, work backwards from outcomes such as happy customers or better quality — or both. And third, product thinking is not just for product managers. In the same way recruiting is not just for recruiters and financial responsibility is not just for accountants, product thinking is for the whole team to contribute to.
Using more technical strategies can have a broad impact. For example, start with the conclusion. Don’t make your team dig for the answer if you already have it. Similarly, don’t hide your asks — bullet out questions and simplify them as much as possible. Next, package your ideas. This is helpful for everyone, as a wall of text can easily overwhelm. Lastly, use the tools you have. Schedule or thread Slacks, compare calendars and place a hold where you see one before interrupting someone’s flow to ask if they have a minute, and be kind to your team’s precious and limited attention.
