By Priya Shankar
It is Tuesday morning in planning. The product roadmap is on the screen. Q2 is coming. A PM is walking through the new feature: a customer dashboard that pulls reporting data from five different backend services, aggregates it, and renders it in a new UI. The timeline is six weeks. Three weeks for backend work. Three weeks for frontend.
The engineers in the room stay quiet.
One engineer, the one who knows the reporting system best, knows that touching the aggregation layer will require changes in three places. One of those places is the tightly coupled module that caused six weeks of work four months ago when they tried to do something similar. She knows it is going to be a mess. But she has tried explaining this before. The last time she brought up architectural constraints, the PM said "let's not get ahead of ourselves" and moved on. She has learned that engineering the right way and being heard are two different things. So she does not say anything. The PM finishes the roadmap walkthrough. It gets approved by leadership. Everyone leaves the meeting.
The team commits to six weeks. They know six weeks is wrong. They commit anyway.
This is the trust gap. And it is not a communication problem.
The trust gap is an information problem. The PM cannot read code. The PM is responsible for the product, but the PM cannot see the most important layer of the product that exists: the architecture. The PM walks into planning meetings without knowing which modules are fragile, which decisions have already locked them in, which parts of the codebase are going to make every future feature harder. The PM is making commitments based on feature logic, customer needs, and market timing—all legitimate concerns—while being completely blind to the architectural reality.
The engineers know the architectural reality. They can see exactly what is going to happen. But they are in a position where they have to choose between two bad options. They can explain the constraints again, risk seeming negative or obstructionist, and probably not be heard anyway. Or they can agree to a timeline they know is wrong and spend the next six weeks building a feature that should take three weeks because the architecture will not cooperate.
Neither option builds trust.
If they speak up: the PM hears criticism of the plan instead of information about the codebase. The discussion turns into a negotiation about timeline instead of a conversation about architectural reality. The PM feels pushed back on. The engineers feel unheard. Both sides walk away with less trust.
If they stay quiet: the team misses the deadline. The feature ships late. The PM assumes the team cannot execute. The team assumes the PM does not care about their constraints. Trust erodes in silence.
The fundamental problem is that the PM is flying blind. The PM is making decisions about a product they cannot see. The decisions look reasonable from a customer and business perspective. They are based on incomplete information from a technical perspective. And the gap between those two perspectives is where the trust dies.
I have watched this happen at every company I have worked at. The shape of it changes, but the pattern is always the same. A PM makes a commitment. Engineers know something about the codebase that changes the math. The two groups cannot see the same product, so they cannot have an honest conversation about what is actually possible. Estimates slip. Trust erodes. Then, six months later, there is a crisis. The team is burning out. The PM is frustrated by what feels like engineering dysfunction. Engineering is frustrated by what feels like product naivete. The relationship is damaged.
None of this is necessary.
The solution is not to turn product managers into software architects. The solution is to give product managers eyes on the codebase. Not the ability to code. Eyes. Visibility. The PM needs to walk into the planning meeting already knowing that the aggregation layer is tightly coupled, that the reporting system has a history of being difficult, that some modules take three weeks to change and some take three days. That is not about turning the PM into an engineer. That is about giving the PM the same architectural reality that the engineers already see.
When a PM has codebase visibility, the planning meeting changes completely. The PM says: "I want to build a customer dashboard that pulls from five services." The engineers see the current architecture. The PM sees it too. The PM realizes immediately that the aggregation layer is going to be the bottleneck. The PM knows that there is a module that has caused problems before. The PM can adjust the scope right there in the meeting, before anyone has committed to anything. The timeline becomes honest. The scope becomes honest.
But more importantly: the PM and engineers are now talking about the same product. The PM is not advocating for features in a vacuum. The engineers are not pushing back on timelines in a vacuum. They are having a conversation about what is actually possible, given the actual state of the codebase.
Trust is rebuilt when both sides can see the same reality. And right now, PMs and engineers are living in two completely different realities. The PM is living in feature-land and market-land. The engineers are living in architectural-land. Neither perspective is wrong. They are just incomplete without the other.
Glue solves this structurally. Glue gives PMs visibility into the codebase without requiring engineer time to explain it. The PM can see which modules are high-touch, which areas have been changing frequently, which parts of the system are tightly coupled. The PM can see at a glance that the aggregation layer has high complexity, that the reporting module is a bottleneck, that there are three different ways data flows through the system and two of them are problematic. The PM does not need to understand the code. The PM just needs to see the pattern.
Then the PM walks into planning already knowing the architectural constraints. The estimates become honest because the PM understands what the engineers are talking about. The scope becomes honest because the PM has already seen where the problems are. The timeline becomes honest because it is not based on feature logic alone.
And the engineers stop staying quiet in meetings. Because the PM is not blind anymore.
The trust gap is not fixed by better communication or team retreats or process changes. It is fixed when both sides can see the same thing. And right now, they cannot. The PM cannot see the codebase. The engineers cannot make the PM see it without turning every planning meeting into a technical education session. So both sides protect themselves. The PM overcommits because they do not know about the constraints. The engineers undercommit because they know about the constraints but cannot force the PM to see them.
Give the PM eyes on the codebase. Everything else falls into place.
Frequently Asked Questions
Won't giving PMs visibility into the codebase make them micromanage engineering decisions? Visibility is not the same thing as authority. Seeing that a module is tightly coupled is different from dictating how it should be refactored. Codebase visibility helps PMs understand constraints, not override them. In fact, PMs with visibility tend to trust engineering judgment more, not less, because they understand the architectural reality behind that judgment. They stop arguing about what is possible and start focusing on what is valuable.
Do PMs really need to understand codebase architecture? Isn't that what Tech Leads are for? Tech Leads should exist. They are not a substitute for PM visibility. A Tech Lead can explain architecture. But that explanation is a one-time thing, and architecture changes every sprint. A Tech Lead explaining the codebase is not the same as the PM being able to see it themselves, in real time. The PM needs to see how the codebase is changing over time and which modules are becoming more fragile or more coupled. That is not something a quarterly architecture review can accomplish.
If we give PMs codebase visibility, won't they use it to justify saying no to features? Maybe. But those are the right nos. If the PM can see that a feature requires touching a module that is already fragile and has a three-week change cycle, saying no to that scope makes sense. The alternative is saying yes to unrealistic timelines, then blaming the team for missing deadlines. Visibility does not give the PM new power to say no. It just helps the PM say no for the right reasons. And engineers respect that.
How much time will this take away from engineering to set up codebase visibility? Zero. Glue does this automatically. There is no engineering lift required. The PM gets access to a dashboard that shows the codebase architecture and how it is changing. No explaining required. No meetings required. The PM can see it any time.