Engineering is the department of the product team that actually builds the product, both software and hardware. The engineering team are given High-Fidelity Prototypes to refer as a living documentation of the product to be built, or at least that’s how it should be.
There’s a bit of a difference between building software products for internal use and software for external customers. Site Operations is dealing with the former, and engineering is about building products for customers.
The Engineering Builds The Product
High-Fidelity Prototypes look like products, but they are not. The difference between a prototype and a product is that products solve problems. And to solve a problem, the product needs the engineering team to implement its features, write its code, test its functionality, and maintain it throughout the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC).
A good place to start building the product is the infrastructure, and this is what the product management asks them to build before the engineering starts working on the actual product. This is a very effective strategy for product development, as starting to build the product during the product discovery will result in unnecessary changes.
Integrations are a way to enhance the product’s functionality, as engineers can handle the integration of third-party services or APIs. That’s exactly how productized-services are created, and it can be built upon a company’s software, but also any publicly accessible APIs.
Feasibility And Estimation
One of the key responsibilities of the engineering is helping the product management to define feasible products. Engineers know best what’s possible to build with the technologies currently available. Left to their own devices, product managers can come-up with great products that are just not possible to be implemented.
Apart from being a reality-check, the engineering helps to estimate the time, and resources, needed to build the features of the product. That’s another way the engineering can be a valuable source of input during the product discovery phase, as it can detect and resolve problems early-on, which would be a lot more difficult during the product development.
Stating The Obvious
Engineers solve problems. The solution of one problem leads to the next, or so to say, creates a new problem. This perpetual pursuit of solutions, and better alternatives to existing ones, results in delivering quality and stability. Some of the best practices, for engineers to deliver high quality code, are code reviews, testing, and automation.
As with best practices, they change a lot, and they change often. What doesn’t change are the needs. Banking software will always need to have high-security standards in place, and that’s probably not a serious concern for a yoga application with a timer and exercises. That’s why, engineering helps product management prioritize the product values.
Before you get bored, I’ll cease with the obvious stuff and state something very bold:”Soft skills are better appreciated in engineers than their technical knowhow is.” I can imagine the jaws, of junior engineers, dropping. You heard that right, social skills like being able to have a normal conversation with another human being is far more valued than sophisticated technical knowledge. I know it’s strange, but that was true even before AI came into the scene, simply because it’s a team game, get it? It’s a product team, not an undefeated product champion! And the skills needed to build a product, are mutually exclusive, so no one can do it all by themselves, it’s a team job.
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