The unspoken, difficult reality of a Product Manager: Your development team might be the stakeholder that hates your product the most. Here are 6 reasons for that and how to deal with it:

1. They know the product in and out — Being a developer of a product means you know it like a car they build themselves. Every poorly put-together part, every risk of failure, every “temporary-but-actually-forever” replacement part looks them dead in the eye every day.

What to do? Make sure that you are the users’ representative to the dev team. Make sure to share positive reviews, growing client numbers, and positive ratings. If it is not the case, perhaps the dev team is up to something and you need to listen closely to what they have to say!

2. They focus only on the bad sides — Hundreds of known bugs, dated architecture, and tech debt are something that dominates the devs’ world and is not something the business part would be focused on all that much. You don’t care that the customers love the bread you deliver if your part of the job is to deliver manure to the field, right?

What to do?