Product Engineering versus Corporate IT
Some of you might remember my article on Squads versus Projects, this is a similar tale of two clearly distinct disciplines, or departments, both necessary and both capable of coexisting in harmony. The distinction though, is important.
Product Engineering is a discipline that centres around adding new value by solving problems through the application of technology and writing code. Product Engineers are deeply involved in the discovery phase that gets to the heart of a customer’s needs. Product Engineers are also intrinsically guided by the usage analytics and performance data that helps inform them on what to do next. They consider whether an experience is resonating and whether users are interacting with it in ways that you perhaps didn’t expect. No two days are the same for a Product Engineer and the software they create is fluid, rather than composed of tasks that are well-defined a long time in advance. They need to be curious, flexible and strong communicators. Product Engineers are the individuals that continually find and evolve the Unique Selling Point (USP) of a company. They deliver outcomes not outputs and as such delivery is not overly predictable.
Corporate IT on the other hand is equally essential, there’s no two ways about it and I don’t want you to think that Product Engineering renders it redundant, far from it. Corporate IT provide laptops, wifi, finance systems and productivity software that enables the day-to-day organisation to actually operate. Nobody is getting much done without Corporate IT. They also have to be curious about customer problems but will tend to solve them by buying and configuring software that has been tried and tested to solve that particular problem time and again in other organisations. Tasks can often be defined well in advance and delivery is therefore generally quite predictable.
I observe organisations all the time that aren’t making this distinction. I’m not too sure why, perhaps it is the organic growth of the digital age and the assumption that all technical people are the same. The result is all-around frustration, unhealthy competition, or the notion that you can only have one or the other, or do the same things with both.
I have found that generally, Engineers that want tasks to be defined for them up front are uncomfortable being put in a position where they have to decide what needs to be built next or frustrated about the amount of time they spend working with Product Designers to prototype and consider different solutions. Similarly, IT Leaders that want predictability and certainty are frustrated when an Engineer is trying to go deeper and deeper into the customer needs, seemingly overcomplicating something that could be quickly solved by buying an off-the-shelf solution. In these instances, the individuals are in the wrong disciplines and going down the wrong career pathways — what’s needed is a discussion about their future career choices!
In summary, any organisation that wants to operate effectively needs both Corporate IT AND Product Engineering in order to be successful. Without the former, you’re not going be able to physically do any work, without the latter you’re unlikely to be in a company that’s around long enough for that work to matter.
Check out more from my series of Product Management articles, Leadership articles or my practical guides on building and operating effective Product Engineering Squads.
All thoughts are my own.
