Before joining a company in a product role, assess the trust and working relationship you'll have with your engineering counterpart — not just the company's market position or product. Tamar Yehoshua (Glean, ex-Slack CPO): "if you have great ideas of what to build but you can't get them built then you go nowhere." A brilliant product vision is inert without an engineering partner who will build it.
Alignment with engineering is not automatic — it requires an explicit division of ownership between the PM and engineering leader, plus ongoing effort to stay aligned as circumstances change. Without this, organizations fall into the Two Dads Problem pattern (Yehoshua's "ask mom, ask dad" dynamic), where people play one leader against the other because ownership boundaries are unclear.