I'm Kayla Carlson. I am the events lead for the Women's Plus Guild here at Twitch. We're thrilled to be bringing you an incredible cast of panelists for the next hour, including folks from Twitch, Amazon, Samsara, and OneReq. Where we'll open up the conversation on finding the right balance between product and engineering teams. We couldn't have made this possible without our amazing partners at Advancing Women in Product. A huge thank you to all of those involved in the coordination of this event. >> Hi, thanks Kayla, so glad to be here. Hey everyone, I'm Jenn Kim, a group product lead at Potato and a head of programming for the SF Chapter of Advancing Women In Product. So AWIP was founded by Google and Amazon PMs, one of whom is on our panel today. Hey Nancy! And it advocates for equal opportunity and career advancement for both women and men. At AWIP, we believe in the power of education and community to push the tech industry forward. So we put on regular events like this one with a number of amazing partners like Twitch and we share them with all of our members. Today's panel, as Kayla mentioned, will be recorded and available soon. If you'd like to learn more, head over to advancingwomeninproduct.org and thanks again for tuning in. So without further ado, I'm going to hand it on over to our moderator Wahab and I'll let him take it over. >> Really excited to be here today with everyone and have this really important conversation. I'm actually going to allow each panelist to briefly introduce themselves. Hi everybody, my name is Nancy Wang. I work at Amazon Web Services and currently lead the product and engineering teams for AWS Backup, which is a service within AWS that provides data protection and management for some of our largest customers. Excited to be here today. >> Hey everybody, I'm EJ. I'm a product manager at Samsara, we're a startup that does IoT products, especially in the fleet management industry for people that have fleets of vehicles. Before that I've worked on my own startup and as well as at Google working on Android and Gmail teams. >> Hi everyone, my name is George Elissaois. I lead a number of our teams here at AWS including Amazon Lightsail, Local Zones, and AWS Wavelength. Really happy to be here today. >> Hey folks, I'm Stephanie Neill. I am a senior director of product at Twitch for the commerce team, and I've been here since June 2019. >> Hi everyone, I'm Sharmeen Browarek Chapp. I'm your VP of product for the community org at Twitch. I manage product and engineering and data for our team and I've been with Twitch for actually it will be five years on Monday. >> Hey everybody, my name is Wahab, I'm the founder, a company built for recruiting professionals called OneReq. I'm also a diversity business partner at Facebook. I've had the pleasure of actually working with Nancy in the past and I'm a huge fan of AWIP as well as Twitch and so really excited to be a part of this really important conversation around optimizing eng and product partnerships. So just to set the stage here for everyone, my recruiting background, it's kind of interesting because I always felt like it was always this trade off. You'd have product leaders coming in trying to get the best head count, we've had eng leaders coming in trying to get the best head count. So we've got both product and eng folks on this panel today, so I'm going to try to be a little bit of a referee here to figure out how do we collaborate effectively to build these awesome products? So a couple of things we want to get out of the conversation. And just to queue up the audience in terms of questions you might have that we'd love to see from you. Why do orgs need this? Why do some orgs have product and engineering reporting into different leaders or actually, an example of this might even be Amazon where they roll up into a GM. And then comparing outcomes of the different models. So to kick things off, I'm actually going to throw this to Nancy. You sit in a number of different roles in terms of product leadership, GM, and then obviously your background at startups and large enterprise. Why is this effective collaboration important? >> Yeah, that's a great question to really kick us off and to set the tone and I'd love to actually hear from the other panelists as well. Is just for my own experience having grown up in the product ladder and more recently moving into a general manager type of role, where you sort of are the using Amazon language, single threaded leader of both product as well as engineering. Is you control both levers, right? So you first interface a lot of customers, they give you their great requirements. Then you also have balance that with can we actually deliver this right? How does that impact our operational burden? Because I can speak for, AWS where our engineers are also responsible for maintaining the systems that they build. So there's often that trade off between speed as well as quality, and that's something that engineers and product managers need to both work together as well as to deliver quality products in the right amount of time. >> Hey, that's really interesting, Nancy. I mean, so you've got this perspective from the GM and large enterprise. Charmeen, you're the VP of product engineering for an org at Twitch, I don't want to put you on the spot, but I'm sure you've got competing interest coming at you. What's your perspective on that question? >> Yeah, we followed suit from Amazon after we were acquired, so we did adopt this single threaded leader approach. And one of the things that -- why I like it the best is actually because it gives a chance to have a lot of different diverse perspectives when you are thinking about your product and business strategy for your org. And something that I know Amazon really believes in customer first and so does Twitch, right? We're very embedded with our users. A lot of people on our teams are users of Twitch and they stream themselves or their friends with people who are users as well. And so when we bring everyone together to talk about a product strategy, you get perspectives from all different types of people and it actually ends up leading us to build better products for our customers at the end of the day. >> When you talk about it, feels like that's absolutely how it should be, right? But that's certainly not always the case. EJ, you're in this work everyday. What does a bad collaboration look like, feel like? Do you have any examples of experiences you've had where it just hasn't gone well? >> Yeah, so bad collaboration usually in the worst case winds up resulting in a waste of engineering and products' time and having to duplicate work or do things over again. So an example of that I have is one time I was working with this enterprise customer and they had this big issue that we needed to solve. And because we didn't collaborate that closely with the engineering team responsible, we didn't really give them the full customer context and telling them, hey, you need to go fix this problem. And as a result the engineers, they made some of their own decisions and they came up with a solution that they thought was technically correct, but didn't wind up actually solving the customer problem because they didn't have that context. And so we wound up having to throw out their work and do it all over again anyway. And so when you're not fully communicating and collaborating correctly, it could mean that you wind up doing work twice, which is never a good thing. >> Yeah, nobody likes a duplicate effort, I think on both the product and the engineering side.
