Mindset Matters. Product Engineering

I’ve been working in different roles as an engineer, engineering leader, and in product for Very Good Security (VGS). We maintain a high level of engineering culture. I personally believe that every engineer can influence their product, organization, country, and the world, by consistently applying an appropriate mindset, with a focus on iterating on ideas, experimenting, getting feedback from real customers, and improving.

I noticed there are two types of thinking and behavior engineers can bring to their day-to-day work duties; a task-oriented mindset or a product-oriented mindset. It doesn’t matter if you’re an engineer, a founder, or any other startup employee. Mindset is not only shaped by the individual but the surrounding culture and environment. Lead by example — your leadership and company values should exemplify this behavior. At VGS a culture of freedom and ownership reinforces a product mindset.

A task-oriented mindset defines your local maximum, meaning you can be successful in terms of the domain or task you’re working on. A product mindset is your global maximum; with unconstrained success not limited to the narrow task at hand, you create solutions rather than completing individual tasks.

For the past year, I’ve been launching several products and onboarding new customers. When you are launching a new product, with time and resource constraints, your daily output is critical to determining success. That’s where the product engineering mindset comes in to play, making the most of your precious time by focusing on the resulting value for users.

Product development is a dynamic system which takes requirements and feedback as input and produces usable features and new feedback. The efficiency of this machine can be tuned and its performance can be streamlined with the right tweaks and adjustments.

Engineers are creative problem solvers

The original Latin meaning of the word ingeniator was “person who creates or devises” and is associated with ingenuity. These ingenious generators are valuable to any organization trying to build something new.

With humanity facing new challenges every day like global warming, epidemics, pollution, resource constraints and the like, we need more product-minded innovative engineers!

Mindset matters

Product Engineer is not a title. It’s a mindset. And mindset matters.

With this mindset, engineers not only know how to build a product but also why they are building it, and what problems they are solving. The feelings of human curiosity and ownership can surface. They have the freedom to create, ship fast, and iterate. As a startup you should fail fast and be ready to pivot. Be flexible, fast, and furious!

Final thoughts

Product-minded engineers are mindful of and contribute to the quality and user experience that results from their work. They do not merely implement directions from on high, but suggest appropriate solutions and balance tradeoffs informed by strong technical knowledge and product experience.

Start with these values to build your product engineering culture:

Value #1: Autonomy

Teams are autonomous, they can make their own decisions informed by analytics, usage data, and customer feedback.

Value #2: Purpose

Engineers need to know the purpose of their efforts to be able to apply and develop a product engineering mindset. They should know who the users are of their product and what problems they have. To that end, there should be salient information about users shared across your organization. Engineers should take part in customer support and solving real customers’ problems by working with them on their issues. This helps engineers connect with users and their problems and gain empathy, promoting a rapid feedback loop in the product development cycle.

Value #3: Responsibility

Responsibility should be distributed throughout the company and should not be the sole provenance of managers. Concentrating the ability to make decisions creates friction and bureaucracy, sapping the momentum of the creative process. Nobody likes having responsibility but it’s a precondition for power. 💪

What next?

If this topic appeals to you, you may be interested in signing up for a newsletter on my recently-created website productengineering.dev. I’m writing a Mindset Newsletter with useful resources on engineering, entrepreneurship, and getting things done.