Are the best Product people Engineers first? No, there is more to it than that.
Though many great Product people (and co-founders) started their careers as Software engineers, 20+ years working in tech suggests that great Product people actually come from a range of backgrounds and are in fact united in attitude, not area of training. The well-publicised claim that the best Product people Engineers first does however deserve analysis, so let’s get right into it.
Reasons for choosing Engineers for Product work
First let’s look at what Engineers bring to Product. If great Product people (to quote Marty Cagan of Silicon Valley Product Group) are people who love solving problems in sustainable ways, then Engineering makes a logical place to look, for the following reasons:
- Engineering is problem solving too. Engineering I would suggest is an applied science – the logical solving of interesting problems. This approach happens to be what solving Product problems requires and therefore it is no surprise that Product and Engineering work so well together, share many common goals and that Engineers jump across to Product.
- They are task-driven. Engineering requires both focus and dedication to the art of cutting code. Both traits translate well to the task-driven nature of Product, particularly when initially creating order amongst the chaos of a new backlog. What’s more, the work ethic of Engineers is easily measured (via commits) – clearly indicating their level of inner drive.
- Engineers know software. Much Product Management is now of software products. As has been mentioned by my colleague Ray Parkar, this means Engineers bring a deep understanding of the technical constraints in the design and build of software – constraints Product people at times may struggle to understand. This certainly gives Engineer-sourced Product folks an edge.
- People management. This one might surprise you. Senior Engineers often have large teams, typically 3-5x the size of Product teams in a tech-driven business. Therefore senior Engineers often gather significant leadership experience which translates well to leading groups of people in a Product role.
Challenges Engineers face when moving into Product
Of course there are also reasons that an Engineer might not be your first pick for a Product role. Here are a few to consider:
- Context switching is tough. One of the superpowers of great Product people is the ability to switch context horizontally from task to task and vertically from detail to big picture and back again. Engineering on the other hand is largely detail-driven and this yields quite a shift in order to lift focus up to strategic themes, and a need to learn to handle context switching.
- Product happens in public. Every decision is visible and debated by the full range of stakeholders from C-suite through to users, Commercial, Operations and Engineering themselves. Engineering on the other hand is one of the more-insulated disciplines. Engineers often feel under scrutiny and find themselves justifying “why it is taking so long”, but they are in fact buffered from prying eyes by their Product team. Stepping into Product often Product feels like stepping onto the front line and they have to get used to being continually interrupted and justifying their actions at all levels.
- Not all products are built. Therefore Engineering may not be the leading attribute to success. I’m old enough to remember the emergence of Product – and to have seen roles that had zero engineering involved. Examples include distributors and resellers, embedded-software (turns out this is a different type of engineering entirely, as pointed out by Brett Swann) and physical products which do not major on software engineering such as retail or food. Clearly all made products require the logical process of engineering, but it is worth being precise when considering candidate background.
- Engineers are expensive. At each level, I’d suggest Engineers are paid more highly than Product people of the same seniority. Indeed across all roles in a tech-driven business, Engineers combine scarcity and therefore value into often eye-watering salaries (take Rust Engineers for example). So a jump into Product is both a leap of faith and a financial set back for many Senior Engineers. This has prevented several colleagues making the jump in my experience.
- Great Product is commercial. Engineers typically have a lot to learn about the commercial realities of running a business and therefore Product’s role in it. Learning takes time and is worth keeping in mind. While some Engineers do enjoy customer time, partner time and even being on sales calls, most do not for reasons of personality and personal choice.
What should we look for in Product people?
In a world where the vast majority of Product people do something else first (tertiary level Product Management courses only recently emerging), what then should we be looking for in great Product people?
Here are a few things to look out for when hiring:
- Product mindset. A logical (yet flexible) approach to solving problems in sustainable ways. Ask: How do they go about solving problems in their current role.
- Fortitude. Product is often a pressure cooker of goals vs deadlines and they will need to succeed in this environment. Ask: How do they handle pressure and what do they do when things go wrong.
- Context switching. They must be willing and able to manage both the detail of tasks in flight and the planning of upcoming work in parallel. For many this is information overload. Ask: For an example of a moment when they felt overloaded by their to-do list and how they got through it.
- The big picture. They must regularly step back from daily delivery and look at the big picture, a rare trait in all humans (thanks to Grant Smith for this insight). To question the value to be delivered, to seek input from users then to prioritise planned work based on knowledge gathered. Ask: To hear about a problem that required stepping back to take in the big picture, and how that translated into their plans.
- Communication. Planning and delivery are both team sports and this is one area so many folks fall down. Plans must be shared and discussed regularly, feedback taken on board and prioritised. Ask: for an example of sharing bad news and how they handled it.
Are the best Product people Engineers first?
So back to the attractively simple hypothesis then. And in summary, no, the best Product people are not necessarily Engineers first. It would be so easy to pounce this as a truism, but the reality doesn’t play out. Though many great Product people did start off as Engineers, and though I’ve been lucky enough to work with several of them, Engineering is just one of several rich veins of life experience that Product does and should draw from.
When building a Product team, my advice therefore is (as with any hiring process) starting with internal, then throw the net wide, to seek first the right attitude with solid proof points as evidence of it, then background (both industry and role experience) second. Attitude is slow to change yet Product, like anything, can be learned.
Photo by Pankaj Patel on Unsplash