What do you do if your decisions as a Product Engineer don't align with the company's long-term goals?

Where does your understanding of the company's long term goals come from? Your direct supervisor or your interpretation of company information. Work with your supervisor to make sure you have a correct understanding. If you are in an engineering leadership position yourself, directly engage in the process of inputting to the process of creating and communicating the long term goals of the company.

This has happened to me a lot in my career. I have seen this mostly happen when you are a technical founder or strong tech leader as you see certain things differently. This is healthy and not bad at all. Healthy & deep conversations are required. Try to understand & look from the engineer's eye or perspective as well. It is impossible to align on everything, everywhere. Not all decisions are correct, it all depends on context. The most crucial thing is one should not be selfish and short-sighted. Make sure it is well presented to stakeholders and you have a healthy framework or these things are discussed without impacting long-term goals.

Don't keep it to yourself. There is nothing that can not be solved or discussed for solutions when brought to the table. Don't be emotional or too attached. Both parties then should give a chance to each other for better understanding. It should be a healthy safe space. Listening is a great skill at this stage. Don't make short-term decisions focus on the big picture. If needed realign with the objectives & goals.

If you can not solve it, then the discussion is useless. Focus on solutions, focus on challenging the status quo. As an engineer, you should focus on coming up with solutions. Don't be too technical while navigating through the whole scenario. You might not like the results or decisions but you should be a product that you made it. You challenged the status quo and were willing to get into solutions. Remember showing problems is easy to do, bringing solutions is hard. So focus on solutions rather than problems.

At a tech company building an observability platform, I pushed for a complex tool that ended up misaligning with our goal of broad usability. Problem: The tool's complexity deterred many potential users. Solution Steps: Acknowledge the misalignment in a team meeting. Gather team feedback for simplification. Adjust the tool to focus on essential, user-friendly features. Ensure future projects align with company goals through regular reviews. Outcome: We simplified the tool, aligning it with our goal of user accessibility, thus supporting broader market adoption.

Bluntness works in these situations. Form a list of the top three to five issues causing the misalignment without being redundant. Consider the logical outcomes for each one in terms of where this will put the product in 1 and 3 year intervals out from today. Use an unbiased value estimator that IS in alignment with accepted measurement of results among you and your leader, and score the results of each direction (yours and external goals). Add a risk estimator to each. Then you can score the directions and argue accordingly- or even change your own position!