Different companies have different balances between the status and relationship of their engineering and product management teams. At some companies, PMs call the shots, at some companies, engineers gate every decision. Yelp has one of the healthiest product/engineering cultures I’ve been around, but it doesn’t come for free. We’ll define the idea of product/engineering balance, talk about what that means at Yelp, how we encourage interaction and closeness, share a few examples of the benefits we’ve seen from a common and balanced culture, and some of the challenges we’re still facing.