The Product Gap

Topics:

• 2:05 – All about product
  • More product responsibilities fall on engineers than ever before
  • Coders can help surface valuable info to business teams about the tradeoffs of their product decisions
  • Learning product makes coders better because it influences what they code, it increases their chance of building software that will actually be used, and it helps them focus at work
  • The symptoms of a product gap drives engineers to think that they need to code more
  • Product gaps often creep up on medium-size teams that don't have dedicated product managers
  • Symptoms of a product gap:
    • Having three number one priorities
    • Coding after hours
    • Tons of work being done, but feeling like you're moving an inch in every direction
    • Hard time estimating
    • You finish a sprint, and you're not sure what the value was
    • "We just need more engineers"
  • If you're on a team with no product manager, and you have a product gap, what can you do?
    • Ask a lot of questions, and push the product decisions up.
    • Let the whole organization feel the pain of the product decisions that aren't being made.
    • Surface the tradeoffs being made.
  • "But this is not my job, I'm an engineer! I just want to code."
    • If you ignore this stuff, your "just coding" won't be sustainable
  • How to get your engineers out of meetings and firing on all cylinders: a product roadmap
    • Make sure your product cards are not about implementation details
  • How to recognize which decisions you can make as an engineer, and which you can't
  • Why you shouldn't say yes to every work request
  • How doubling your estimates can surface product issues