In the past 10 years, I’ve run a number of engineering organizations in various startups to large companies. My goal is always how can we make high quality decisions faster, ship faster, iterate faster, and learn faster. After running both product and engineering at Pared, I’m able to distill my philosophies down to Product Focused Engineering.
What is a Product Focused Engineer?
A product focused engineer understands not only what to build and how to build it, but ultimately why are we building it. They have the user empathy to understand what the best UX is to solve the problem. There is an active user-centric dialog with PMs and designers. Who is the user we’re trying to solve for? Why does this make the product better?
This is where the magic happens.
Trade off conversations change from date driven to solutions driven; how can we solve the user problem faster and better? 80/20 Pareto solutions are offered from everybody, not just product. Gaps in designs or specs are magically filed because everybody understands and is empowered to make decisions. Engineering becomes an innovation center not just ticket takers.
