Should Engineers Have a Say in Product Strategy—or Just Ship Tickets?

The Programmer in the Cave is Dead (But Nobody Told Most Teams)

There’s a mental model that’s been haunting tech companies for decades. You know the one: the brilliant programmer, isolated in their cave, receives a ticket, implements the solution exactly as specified, and ships it. Clean. Transactional. Utterly pointless. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: if that’s how your engineering team operates, you’re leaving massive amounts of money on the table. Not because engineers aren’t shipping code—they are. But because they’re shipping code without understanding the why, the what-for, or the what-if-we-don’t. The question isn’t whether engineers should have a say in product strategy. The question is: can you afford for them not to? Let me explain why this matters, and more importantly, how to actually make it work without turning every standup into a three-hour philosophical debate.

The Case for the Obvious

Every single decision—be it business, design, or engineering—affects the product strategy, and product strategy affects what actually gets built. This isn’t poetry. This is cause and effect. And yet, somehow, we keep pretending that engineers are just executors of someone else’s vision. Consider a practical scenario: Your product manager comes to you and says, “We need to ship this feature by next quarter to hit our revenue target.” Sounds clear, right? But here’s what they might not know: your codebase is held together with technical debt and duct tape. That feature they want? Doable in three weeks if you hack it. Doable properly—in a way that won’t crumble six months later—requires eight weeks. An engineer who just nods and ships it in three weeks has made a strategic decision: favor short-term metrics over long-term product health. An engineer who speaks up, explains the tradeoff, and proposes a compromise (maybe launch with a reduced scope, or shift something else)? That engineer is doing product strategy. And here’s the kicker: Product strategy and execution are everyone’s responsibility. If the feature is buggy six months down the line, it’s not just the engineer’s problem. It’s the team’s problem. If you’re so swamped in technical debt that you can’t build anything new, guess what? Team problem.

What Engineers Actually Bring to the Table

Let me be specific about why including engineers in strategy conversations isn’t just nice—it’s necessary.

1. They Know What’s Actually Possible

Product managers are brilliant at understanding market opportunities and customer needs. But they often can’t predict whether something is technically feasible within a reasonable timeline. Engineers can. More importantly, engineers can often suggest better ways to achieve the same outcome. Example: A PM wants to build a real-time collaboration feature. An engineer who’s been silent in meetings might think: “We’ll need to build a WebSocket server, set up complex state management, and handle conflict resolution.” But an engineer who’s actually in the room might say: “Wait, do we really need all users editing simultaneously? What if we optimize for sequential edits with a smart notification system?” Suddenly, the scope just changed by 60%, and you’re not sacrificing quality.

2. They Spot Systemic Issues Early

Engineers work in the code every day. They see the patterns. They know where the rot is setting in. They can tell you which architectural decisions are going to haunt you in two years if you don’t address them now. This is where technical debt enters the conversation—but not in the “let’s have a sprint to clean up code” way. In the “if we don’t fix our database query patterns, we’ll hit a scaling wall at our growth target” way. That’s a strategic insight that should influence your entire roadmap.

3. They Can Prototype and Validate Faster

Want to know if your idea actually solves the problem? Rather than spend weeks on requirements documents, ask an engineer to build a quick prototype or spike. The learning you get from seeing the idea in motion often redirects your entire strategy. Engineers help you buy time and information with smaller experiments before committing to the big bet.

4. They Bring Data and Context

While building features, engineers notice things. They see which parts of the system are being used, where performance degrades, what patterns customers are hacking around. They’re sitting on a gold mine of product insights that nobody’s mining because they’re not in the room when strategy gets discussed.

The Collaboration Framework: How This Actually Works

Alright, enough theory. Let’s get practical. Here’s a concrete framework for how engineers should participate in product strategy without turning chaos into chaos with extra steps.

Step 1: Establish Clear Ownership Zones

The first thing to clarify: what does each role actually own?

The key word here is clarity. When everyone knows their zone and respects the other zones, you get collaboration instead of chaos.

Step 2: Create a “Before You Commit” Protocol

This one’s simple but essential: engineers should never commit to deadlines they can’t actually meet. Not as a “no.” As a conversation starter.

❌ Bad: "I can't promise that."
✅ Good: "I can promise it in 8 weeks if we want it done right, or 3 weeks if we're okay with technical debt. Here's what the 3-week version means for our ability to scale in Q3..."

See the difference? The second response isn’t a blocker. It’s strategy. It puts the tradeoff on the table so the team can make an informed decision.

Step 3: Communication During Execution

Here’s where most teams fail: the engineer shuts up once the ticket is created. During execution, quality decisions cascade. You realize the spec doesn’t account for accessibility. You find a performance bottleneck that changes your approach. You discover the API response format could be better designed for the client side. These aren’t implementation details. These are strategic decisions being made in real-time. And if the engineer handles them in isolation, you lose all that value. The rule: Communicate clearly when things change. Before it’s too late.

# Example: During implementation, you discover accessibility issues
# INSTEAD of silently hacking it:
# You communicate: "The spec doesn't account for keyboard navigation
# and screen reader support. Current timeline gets us 70% there.
# We can either: 
# (1) Ship on time with accessibility debt noted
# (2) Delay 2 weeks to do it right
# (3) Reduce scope (remove the advanced filtering UI)"
# This is a strategic decision that the team needs to make together.

Step 4: Feed Data Back

Show, don’t tell. Bring metrics.

Instead of: "Our codebase is a mess."
Do this: "Our P99 response time for the main feature is 2.3 seconds.
          After the last refactor, it's 340ms. Each 1-second improvement
          in load time typically correlates with X% improvement in retention.
          This refactor could unlock Y% retention improvement for us."

Now you’re speaking the PM’s language. You’re not asking for tech debt time. You’re asking for a feature that improves a business metric. The implementation happens to be “rewriting the authentication layer,” but that’s the how, not the what.

Visualizing the Strategy Alignment Loop

Here’s what healthy engineer participation in strategy looks like:

Notice what’s missing? The “engineer receives ticket in isolation” step. That’s the point.

The Real World: When Engineers Shape Outcomes

Let’s look at a concrete example of how this plays out: Scenario: You’re building a reporting dashboard. The PM wants it fast, users want features. The siloed engineer ships a dashboard that’s slow with large datasets. By month 3, users are reporting 5-second load times. Now you’re in crisis mode—rebuild or patch? Time wasted, revenue impacted. The strategic engineer says in the planning meeting: “If we’re targeting 100k+ records, we need to think about data pagination, caching, or aggregation. Do we want to optimize for the happy path initially and add complexity later, or build it right from the start?” The team decides: launch with 10k limit, add aggregation in phase 2. Everyone understands the tradeoff. When phase 2 comes around, the decision to add aggregation makes sense contextually, not as a crisis fix. Same outcome timeline. Better decision-making. Better product.

The Honest Challenge

I’ll be real: this requires a different type of engineer than the “just take the ticket” archetype we’ve been training for decades. It requires engineers who:

• Ask “why” more than “what”—not to be difficult, but to understand context
• Communicate clearly about tradeoffs—not just about how technical things work
• Take ownership of outcomes, not just features
• Make decisions deliberately, not just implement what they’re told
• Build trust by following through on commitments And it requires a PM and leadership team who:
• Invite engineers into strategic conversations—not just execution reviews
• Listen to and actually value engineering perspective
• Respect the expertise and let engineers own their “how”
• Make decisions collaboratively, not autocratically

The Path Forward

If your team isn’t doing this yet, here’s a three-week mini-roadmap to shift culture: Week 1: Have a team conversation about decision ownership. Use the table above. Get explicit about who owns what. Week 2: In your next strategy session, deliberately ask for engineering perspective on feasibility, risks, and alternatives before committing to timelines. Week 3: Document one decision made during execution. Show the team how the engineer’s call affected the outcome. Normalize this. Repeat until it’s not unusual anymore.

The Bottom Line

The programmer in the cave is dead. They should be. Because the product that emerges from collaboration—from engineers who understand the strategy and strategy makers who understand the constraints—is exponentially better than what emerges from isolation. You’re not asking engineers to stop shipping tickets. You’re asking them to ship better tickets, informed by strategy. And you’re asking yourself to ship better strategy, informed by technical reality. That’s not overhead. That’s competitive advantage. So here’s my question for you: Is your team doing this? If not, what’s the one blocker stopping you from starting? The siloed mindset? Communication breakdown? Lack of trust? Pick it, own it, and fix it. The engineers who speak up and shape strategy aren’t being difficult. They’re being invaluable. Everything else is just hitting deadlines. And there are a lot cheaper ways to do that.