Giving them the opportunity to participate in the product launch decisions from a marketing standpoint also highlighted an embarrassing point for marketing, and that was engineering often understood the competition and its true functionality better than anyone in marketing. The reason is that the engineers had taken great pride in working on their product features they were responsible for to make them the best in the industry, and it was clear some had taken great pains to make a statement in their work. Creating shared ownership of product outcomes strengthens morale of technical professionals and infuses an entire development team with more accountability (Voss, 1993) and willingness to internalize a strong commitment to the success of the product (Kochanski, Ledford, 2001). The risk of recommending this strategy would be that the more dominant engineers would overrule marketing and turn the entire marketing strategy into more of a features discussion than one based on business benefits. Integrating teams together runs the risk of personalities and personal agendas impeding and sabotaging overall team performance (Baccarini, Salm, Love, 2004). To make sure this did not happen, the Senior VP of Marketing and Senior VP of Engineering would arbitrate strategic changes to messaging, yet our organization found that within sixteen weeks of the formal launch date we had to freeze the application so it could be launched on time. Once this parameter was set in the schedule, engineering provides exceptional competitive analysis and focused on how to illustrate the applications' strength, often quantifying its performance relative to competitors, sharing data on benchmarks they had done...

By including engineering as part of the competitive analysis, new customer scenario planning, and pricing discussions, valuable data was gained they had gained during the development process. Giving technical professionals ownership is invaluable as a strategy for attaining high levels of collaboration (Thamhain, 2004).
References

David Baccarini, Geoff Salm, & Peter ED Love. (2004). Management of risks in information technology projects. Industrial Management + Data Systems, 104(3/4), 286-295.

Jain, S.. (2008). DECISION SCIENCES: A Story of Excellence at Hewlett-Packard. OR-MS Today, 35(2), 20

James Kochanski & Gerald Ledford. (2001). "How to keep me" -- retaining technical professionals. Research Technology Management, 44(3), 31-38.

Li, Y., & Zhu, K.. (2009). Information acquisition in new product introduction. European Journal of Operational Research, 198(2), 618.

Long, S., & Spurlock, D.. (2008). Motivation and Stakeholder Acceptance in Technology-driven Change Management: Implications for the Engineering Manager. Engineering Management Journal, 20(2), 30-36.

Hans J. Thamhain (2004). Team Leadership Effectiveness in Technology-Based Project Environments. Project Management Journal, 35(4), 35-46.

Voss, Bristol. (1993). Wait till the guys…