When Engineering and Marketing work closely

Prior to doing Product Management, I was an Engineer in VTune, a performance tuning product from Intel. Now Intel prides that it is an Engineering and a Technology company. Why is this relevant to the topic? Well you see, what this means is Engineers and Architects decide what are the features for a product release and this is often based on how cool the technology sounds vs. does a user really care or is the technology being presented in a useful fashion or does this impact the top line?

In the last two years I have done product management for three products. I have been very fortunate to be working with excellent Engineering Managers with whom I have gotten along very well. Why is this needed other than for obvious reasons that all functions are necessary to release a product?

My experience has been that while Product Management is good at saying - that feature would be cool to have because it differentiates us or adds value to users, only Engineering is best positioned to say whether it can be delivered and if so what is the quality (include performance)/cost/time? Also many times if I work in a solo, I make judgments such as "Nah - this is difficult to do in this time" etc. But if you work this closely with Engineering, they can suggest you technologies / research work / alternate paths that enable you to get more than you originally thought possible.

Also things are not really black and white. If Engineering and Marketing work closely, you can prioritize and juggle tasks in a more granular fashion (than at common touch points such as Alpha, Beta, Release) which means there is nothing to test until a very long time. Welcome to Agile development - but this is not only an Engineering term, it applies to Product Management as well.

But this requires the two functions to trust each other and recognize that over-arching goal of both functions is the same - product success. Trust is key because there are sensitivities if one function crosses over to the other and this happens far too often because there is a thin line that separates the functions. Transparency is key as well - when I was an engineer, I know my team has done features that Marketing never requested because we said "marketing just does not get it". Similarly it is important for Product Planning to work out product objectives and features with Engineering and ensure agreement on the rationale, priority, time-frame. It is also important to stay out of dictating how things get done.

Every time I tend to be in a difficult spot with Engineering - I step back and ask - there's got to be a win-win, why are we fighting when we have the same goal.

Thoughts?