1. Learn the grammar of your customers (past, current, future) and your engineering team. Your task is not learning/translating vocabularies, it is translating grammars.
2. Be the repository of context for all decisions.
3. Assign a TTL (Time to Live) to every feature – ensure it is known and understood by your customers and your engineers.
4. Understand how a clutch/transmission works – this is your primary function in this role. Your technology/team is the engine.
5. Claim all failures, own all dependencies of subsequent effects of failures.
6. Build credibility with each engineer without a reporting structure. Do they come to you first when fast-iterating? If not, work on making that happen.
7. Read, understand Carol Dweck‘s work – it is the single most useful tool you will have for your interaction with engineers.