Why is Product Source of Problems??
From my career, I found in any organization complex enough to have a product manager or product owner, where the role is to “manage the product” - that is to create the product with engineering, I found this truth:
Product teams are source of problems. Engineering teams solves those problems.
No matter the number of tools available in the whole organization or in the world, whenever product encounters any small problem - it’s engineerings’ job to solve it.
- Product needs user feedback? Engineering: create feedback form in the app. (How about: use a survey form tool?!)
- Product asked about usage data - engineering, implement tracking into the app. (How about looking at a log dump in a spreadsheet?!)
- Product thinking how useful each of the ways to implement a new feature would be - engineering: implement all of them and see which one the user likes the best. (How about walking through each solution with a user and doing the work?!)
Granted, I haven’t worked in a lot of companies and maybe I haven’t worked with world-class product teams - yet, nobody told me I am wrong in the above train of thought by other engineers, product managers, executives, etc.
Even engineers that transitioned into a product role - it seems like they lost the “problem solving” capability as soon as they took on the new role. The bigger irony is that they sold themselves into the role by saying: “my engineering background will help be a better product person”.
🤦
I will admit, I’m ranting a bit - at the same time, it just sucks to be on the: “solve this problem” when the product person just seems so helpless to solve the problems and engineering is helpless to push back on product by saying:
Solve it your own damn self!
This is why I dream of a company where everyone codes - yes, even managers, CEOs, etc. Wouldn’t that be awesome? No loss of fidelity.
Everyone is solving problems for the company, which we need - because there’s an endless number of problems and there’s only limited number of engineers.