Building software that users actually want

As anyone who’s been focusing on creating the best products possible would tell you, building software that users love is extremely difficult. Yet most software engineers are only interested in the implementation part, and not many spend time thinking about what users care about the most. A common argument justifying this behaviour is that defining products is the job of a Product Manager or a Technical Program Manager. However, being active with product definition can be very rewarding, arguably much more so than just taking orders captured in a Jira story. In addition, a lot of details are often missed and engineers who don’t understand the users often end up creating well engineered products that no one uses. A classic comic strip pokes fun at this.

Just as the industry realized about 10 years ago the importance of combining dev and ops into devops, it is perhaps equally powerful to combine product and dev into Product-Dev.

At least make sure the engineering team is diverse

Buying into the product-dev setup doesn’t solve all the problems though, as it creates some new ones. A notable issue is that some engineers believe they are the users or they know the users more than the users do themselves! They would create new products in silo, imagining the challenges they have and the…