The engineer-product manager relationship is uniquely fraught due to non-overlapping skillsets and mutual inability to verify each other's claims. Trust erodes over time as engineers give wrong estimates and PMs change requirements without explanation, leading to manipulation from PMs and lies from engineers. To build a healthy relationship: understand the PM's constraints (they're often not the source of changing priorities), be reliably accurate in your technical assessments, defer to their political judgment as they defer to yours technically, and accept that some PMs will simply be difficult to work with. Notably, 'technical' ex-engineer PMs can be worse than non-technical ones, as they may believe they can detect when engineers are being dishonest. The structural incentives of the relationship create conflict regardless of individual intent.
