Understanding functional perspectives

Every team views products through their unique lens:

• Engineers assess technical feasibility and different ways to solve the problem in hand, system performance, and implementation complexity. They worry about scalability, maintenance costs, and whether features align with existing architecture.
• Designers champion user needs, visual consistency, and interaction patterns. They balance business goals with user experience, fighting for simplicity while others push for more features.
• Marketing teams focus on positioning, competitive advantages, and customer messaging.
• Sales wants features that close deals, customer support needs bug fixes that reduce tickets, finance tracks revenue impact, customer success wants to improve their strategic clients' success rates, and legal wants the product and how we build it to comply with regulations.

Recognizing these perspectives helps product managers navigate trade-offs and build consensus around shared goals.