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What Product people can learn from Engineers

There is plenty we Product people can learn from the good folks in Engineering.

Product and Engineering go together like birds of a feather and yet so often the two groups define themselves by their differences. A case in point: my last post disagreeing with claims that great Product people were often Engineers first. Let’s flip that on its head and instead take a look at what the two can learn from each other – starting with what Product can learn from Engineering.

Engineering has taught me a lot

I grew up around engineers and scientists – and have spent most of my life working with those of the software engineer variety. Here’s just a few key things I reckon we Product people can learn from these good folks and their engineering ways.

  1. A problem solving mindset. The biggest learning has to be the way they look at the work and indeed the world around them, their mindset of rational analysis. Family members might be heard to complain that they are “always looking to solve problems” and I’d say this very skill to notice when something isn’t optimal, followed by a willingness to pause and understand it, then to test a series of potential fixes until one seems worth doing, this is the secret sauce.
  2. A can do attitude. Engineers love fixing things and this I find translates into a can do attitude we can all take inspiration from. Look beyond the grumpy engineer stereotype for a moment to what is really happening on the ground. How many times have you seen a PM take a new problem worth solving to their Tech Lead, cap in hand, knowing the backlog is full for the next 6 months and that the Tech Lead is flat out busy? Just as many I’d suggest as you’ve seen Tech Leads stop and listen, chew over the new problem together and brainstorm options for prioritisation and queuing. It’s easy to become worn down by carrying the weight of a heavy backlog but as a mentor used to say – “the only way out is through”, so adopting this focus on fixing and the resulting attitude makes good sense.
  3. A love of learning. Many years ago as I began to lead Product teams, it became clear that something different was happening over there in my partner in crime’s Engineering team. They were running regular Tech town halls, lunch n’ learns and seemed to love sharing something new they’d learned about this or that on Slack or Teams. They seemed to enjoy learning and to see the value in carving out time to keep learning along with the evolution of technology. Product evolves along with people and technology and so we could benefit a lot from adopting this lifelong learning practice into our daily lives too.
  4. Willingness to experiment. To an engineer, life is an experiment and just as they might enjoy tinkering with their snazzy mechanical keyboards or their radio set that talks to the space station in their spare time, they seem to take satisfaction testing ideas at work. The Agile mindset and the Lean ways of working that followed it both encourage rapid cycles of “learn, test, do” and it is worth noticing just how your engineers go about planning, running and learning from experiments on a daily basis. Just how they are slightly less scared of failure due to the need and desire to test out options. Applying this to your daily Product tasks could just be life-changing.
  5. A love of dark places. OK, that’s taking it a bit far but you get the idea. Engineers understand the need for focus time. There is a reason many engineers you know have a shed or a room that they keep full of useful bits (junk to most), yet is unusually calm and quiet. They instinctively seem to understand the value of taking a problem away to their island of calm and taking time to turn it over, see it from all angles and to test out solutions. Before long they will emerge with an often surprisingly simple solution and here’s the rub – that quiet time won’t have seemed very long. They carve out focus time to work on an issue and they don’t need to switch off interruptions very long in order to come up with a great outcome in many cases. We Product people are by our nature right in the midst of the discovery, planning and doing action and therefore are interrupted constantly. It’s well worth taking note of your Engineering colleagues practice of carving out focus time and working even micro-focus blocks into your calendar in order to give problems worth solving the time it takes to solve them.

Conclusion: Product people can learn a lot from Engineering

Product and Engineering are often termed the two sides of the same coin and they work closely together, with any luck in complete and dynamic harmony (more on that another day). So it isn’t surprising to note that they share the solving of many user and technology problems, nor to notes that the ways engineers approach solving their share could teach us Product people a thing or two.

I could continue to wax lyrical on all the things I’ve learned from great engineers I’ve had the privilege to work alongside, and quite likely I’ll share some more learnings soon.

Meanwhile let me leave you with this – seek first to understand the technical half of the problem solving duo you belong to and doing so you might be surprised what helpful tips you discover.