Stop Feeding Your Engineers
In advising product teams across industries, I’ve noticed a common pattern: product managers often feel compelled to “feed” their engineers. Every sprint, PMs fill backlogs with small, low-value tasks - adjusting button placements, tweaking color schemes, or addressing minor bugs. This practice, while seemingly productive, often masks a deeper issue: a lack of alignment between day-to-day activities and long-term strategic goals.
Why does this happen? For many PMs, the pressure to keep engineers “busy” is overwhelming. Stakeholders expect visible progress, and sprints feel incomplete without a full slate of tasks. However, this task-feeding habit often creates an illusion of progress. Engineers appear occupied, the backlog looks active, and small updates are shipped regularly. But when these tasks aren’t tied to meaningful outcomes, they distract from the bigger picture.
Take a closer look, and you’ll see the hidden costs. Engineers, drained by repetitive busywork, miss opportunities to tackle impactful technical investments. PMs, bogged down in micromanaging trivial tasks, lose the bandwidth needed to focus on discovery and strategy. Worse yet, the product’s long-term trajectory suffers, as foundational improvements and bold new initiatives are deprioritized.
Why PMs Fall Into the Feeding Trap
The feeding trap is often a response to uncertainty. Identifying the next large product initiative takes time. It requires deep customer research, stakeholder alignment, and experimentation. During this discovery period, PMs may feel uneasy about leaving engineering capacity underutilized. Rather than embracing this as a natural part of the innovation process, they default to busywork as a stopgap.
But the cost of this short-term thinking is steep. When engineers focus on cosmetic updates instead of addressing tech debt or building scalable infrastructure, the product’s technical foundation begins to erode. When PMs prioritize immediate visibility over strategic clarity, they risk losing credibility with their teams and stakeholders.
A Better Path Forward
The solution isn’t to keep engineers idle while PMs navigate uncertainty. Instead, it’s about empowering teams to work autonomously on high-value problems. By fostering technical and design roadmaps that operate independently of day-to-day PM involvement, you create space for engineers to contribute meaningfully while freeing yourself to focus on discovery.
We’ll explore actionable strategies to enable this autonomy, from technical roadmaps to “burn lists” of small issues, ensuring engineers remain productive without being micromanaged.
Empowering Teams Through Technical and Design Autonomy
Breaking free from the feeding trap requires more than just acknowledging the problem; it demands structural changes to how teams operate. By empowering engineering and design teams with autonomy, PMs can shift their focus from micromanaging backlogs to driving strategic discovery. This autonomy doesn’t just benefit PMs; it enhances team engagement, builds accountability, and ensures that high-value work continues uninterrupted, even during periods of uncertainty.
Empowerment Through a Technical Roadmap
Engineering teams thrive when they have a clear vision of long-term technical investments. A well-crafted technical roadmap outlines major initiatives - such as reducing tech debt, automating repetitive processes, or upgrading infrastructure - that enable future product scalability and reliability. These initiatives provide engineers with meaningful work that supports both their growth and the product’s long-term success.
Consider an engineering team dealing with a bloated deployment process that slows down the release cycle. Without a clear roadmap, engineers might spend their time on incremental fixes or low-impact tasks. But with a roadmap prioritizing automation enhancements, such as implementing continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, they can focus on transforming a bottleneck into a streamlined workflow. This not only saves time but also ensures faster delivery of future features.
Technical roadmaps empower engineers to plan and execute foundational work during quieter periods. PMs, in turn, can step back from assigning low-value tasks and concentrate on uncovering customer needs or exploring new market opportunities.
The Power of a Burn List
While technical roadmaps guide larger-scale efforts, teams also need a mechanism to address the smaller, more tactical items that arise daily. This is where a “burn list” comes into play. A burn list is a collection of well-scoped engineering maintenance tasks - such as removing deprecated code, eliminating feature flags, or updating internal documentation - that engineers can tackle independently without requiring constant prioritization from PMs.
For example, consider a product that has accumulated numerous feature flags from previous launches. These flags may no longer serve a purpose, but they add unnecessary complexity to the codebase. Adding the task of “remove unused feature flags” to the burn list ensures it gets addressed during periods of downtime, leading to a cleaner and more maintainable codebase. Similarly, updating internal onboarding documentation for new engineers is a critical task that often goes overlooked but can significantly improve team efficiency over time.
Burn lists are not a dumping ground for random tasks but a curated set of actionable items that reflect the team’s commitment to maintaining a healthy technical ecosystem. This approach allows engineers to proactively identify and resolve minor inefficiencies that can otherwise grow into larger issues.
Addressing Design Debt
Design debt - the accumulation of inconsistencies and outdated patterns in a product’s interface - is another area where autonomy can thrive. Just as technical debt can slow engineering velocity, design debt can erode the user experience and make future iterations more cumbersome. Empowering design teams to maintain their own backlog of improvements ensures that these issues are addressed proactively.
For instance, a design team might identify that a product’s older components lack alignment with the current design system. Updating these components not only enhances visual consistency but also simplifies future feature development by reducing ambiguity for engineers. By owning a backlog of design debt items - such as updating typography, modernizing icons, or refining workflows - designers can work closely with engineers to execute these changes seamlessly.
Moreover, this approach aligns with the principles of autonomy. Engineers and designers can collaborate on scoped design improvements without requiring PMs to step in and prioritize each task. This allows PMs to focus on strategic initiatives while ensuring that the product’s overall quality continues to improve.
Benefits Beyond Productivity
Empowering teams with technical roadmaps, burn lists, and design debt backlogs goes beyond keeping them busy. It builds a culture of ownership, where team members feel trusted to make decisions and take initiative. When engineers and designers are given the tools and autonomy to act independently, they’re more likely to innovate and identify opportunities for improvement.
For example, an engineering team working on a burn list might identify a recurring issue with error reporting. By proactively addressing it, they could not only fix the problem but also implement a more robust error logging system that benefits the entire product. Similarly, a designer tackling design debt might notice opportunities to simplify workflows, making the product more intuitive for users and reducing support tickets.
These contributions, though incremental, compound over time to create a product that’s not only more functional but also more delightful to use. Meanwhile, PMs gain the freedom to think big: conducting user research, exploring strategic pivots, and crafting a long-term vision for the product.
Sustained Momentum Through Collaboration
Autonomy doesn’t mean isolation. Collaboration remains essential for these systems to work effectively. PMs should regularly sync with engineering and design leads to review progress on technical roadmaps, burn lists, and design backlogs. These check-ins are an opportunity to celebrate wins, address blockers, and ensure alignment with broader product goals.
For instance, a monthly review of the burn list might reveal patterns in minor issues that hint at larger systemic problems. Addressing these insights can inform the technical roadmap or even inspire new strategic initiatives. Similarly, design debt reviews can spark discussions about how to align future features with evolving user needs.
Creating Space for Strategic Discovery
By shifting day-to-day decision-making to empowered teams, PMs can redirect their energy toward high-impact activities. Instead of triaging tasks, they can immerse themselves in discovery work: interviewing customers, prototyping innovative solutions, and analyzing competitive landscapes. This not only enhances their own effectiveness but also positions the product for long-term success.
Empowering teams isn’t about relinquishing control; it’s about creating a foundation for sustainable, scalable growth. When engineers and designers are trusted to execute autonomously, and PMs are free to focus on strategy, the entire product development process becomes more aligned, efficient, and impactful.
Shifting PMs from Task Managers to Strategy Builders
Stopping the practice of feeding engineers isn’t just about reducing busywork; it’s about rethinking how product managers lead. At its core, this shift involves moving away from micromanaging daily tasks and embracing a broader vision of strategic impact.
While the temptation to assign minor tasks persists, especially in organizations with entrenched processes, successful PMs recognize that their value lies in guiding the team toward long-term outcomes rather than short-term appearances of productivity.
Understanding Organizational Pitfalls
Large organizations like big banks or retailers often exemplify the pitfalls of feeding engineers. These institutions, bound by legacy systems and bureaucratic inertia, frequently fill engineering sprints with tasks that offer immediate, visible results but little strategic value. For example:
A retailer might prioritize cosmetic updates to an e-commerce platform - such as changing button colors or rearranging filters - while delaying significant investments in backend infrastructure that could reduce downtime during peak sales seasons.
A bank might focus on building incremental features for a mobile app while ignoring the pressing need to modernize outdated authentication systems that pose security risks.
The root causes of this pattern often stem from how organizations manage and measure progress:
Maximizing Story Points Delivered: Agile frameworks, particularly Scrum, emphasize delivering a predictable volume of work within each sprint. This creates a bias toward loading sprints with well-understood, easily measurable tasks. As a result, cosmetic updates (e.g., copy changes or button placements) often take precedence over complex but impactful work, such as modernizing backend systems or exploring new technologies.
Focus on Predictability Over Exploration: Predictable work - like addressing minor bugs or tweaking existing features - fits neatly into sprint cycles, while exploratory tasks involving technical uncertainty, like prototyping or integrating new architectures, are often sidelined due to their potential to disrupt timelines.
Stakeholder Pressure for Visibility: Stakeholders often push for tasks that yield visible outcomes, such as updating the homepage or adding new filters, as these are easier to showcase to customers and executives. However, these short-term wins frequently detract from long-term investments that could deliver greater value.
Fear of Idle Capacity: Organizations worry about leaving engineering capacity unused during periods of strategic uncertainty. Rather than embracing downtime as an opportunity for planning and reflection, they fill sprints with busywork to ensure teams appear productive.
These practices create a culture where engineering teams are perpetually reactive, addressing symptoms rather than root causes. PMs who perpetuate this cycle not only stifle innovation but also fail to leverage their team’s full potential.
Breaking the Cycle
Transitioning to strategic leadership means reshaping how you approach your role as a PM. This doesn’t mean abandoning execution altogether - it means ensuring that every action aligns with the bigger picture. Here’s how to break the cycle:
1. Reframe Your Priorities
Instead of asking, “What can engineers work on this sprint?” start asking, “What will move the needle for our customers and our business?” This shift requires clarity on which initiatives offer the greatest return on investment - whether that’s building a game-changing feature, addressing foundational tech debt, or exploring untapped markets.
For example, if a PM notices that customer churn stems from slow page load times, addressing performance issues should take precedence over shipping new, flashy features. By tying decisions directly to customer and business impact, you’ll naturally deprioritize busywork.
2. Advocate for High-Value Work
As a strategic leader, your role extends beyond your immediate team. You must advocate for initiatives that may lack immediate visibility but deliver outsized value over time. For instance, pitching the importance of improving CI/CD pipelines might not excite stakeholders initially, but framing it as “reducing deployment times by 30%, enabling faster delivery of revenue-generating features” makes the case compelling.
3. Push Back on Low-Value Requests
One of the hardest parts of leadership is saying no. Stakeholders often push for quick fixes or visible wins, but part of your responsibility is to steer the team away from distractions. Use data and examples to illustrate why certain tasks don’t align with strategic goals. For instance:
“While updating the homepage banner is tempting, we’ve seen from analytics that only 5% of users interact with it. Let’s instead focus on improving search functionality, which 60% of users rely on.”
4. Empower Engineers to Lead
Empowered teams are more engaged and productive. Encourage engineers to identify and champion their own high-value projects, whether it’s addressing tech debt or streamlining internal tools. This autonomy not only builds morale but also surfaces impactful ideas that PMs might overlook.
For example, an engineer might propose creating automated scripts to eliminate repetitive tasks during onboarding. By supporting these initiatives, you foster a culture of ownership and continuous improvement.
Closing Thoughts
The next time you’re reviewing a backlog or planning a sprint, pause and ask yourself: “Am I feeding my engineers, or am I empowering them to drive impact?”
This question isn’t just a check on task prioritization; it’s a check on your leadership philosophy. Your ability to guide teams toward meaningful outcomes - while resisting the temptation to fill every sprint with small wins - is what separates effective PMs from truly exceptional ones.
By refusing to feed your engineers, you’re not just improving sprint efficiency; you’re transforming the culture of your team, your product, and ultimately, your organization.
Thank you to Pauli Bielewicz, Mary Paschentis, Goutham Budati, Markus Seebauer, Juliet Chuang, and Kendra Ritterhern for making this guide possible.
