Engineering x Product x Teamwork

As a computer science graduate, it was so normal I started my career as a software engineer. I coded, I learnt. I did everything needed to strengthen my technical skills. Someday, I realized that I want to do something bigger, something more impactful. Then I recalled my first engineering lecture in my university life with a quote,

“Engineering is the technique to solve problems”

What’s the problem?

Problems are from everything around us. We can solve human problems, we can also solve problems for animals, for our environment. Problems are based on needs. People want to listen to music everywhere anytime, Spotify solved it. People want to travel to Mars, SpaceX is trying to find the way. Every startups would have their problems to solve. They wrap up them as their products and ship to their target audiences. Software engineers do need to know what are their problems and throughly understand them.

Sometimes, engineers might spend all of their time to write the best codes, build the perfect architectures, study the most efficient algorithm, they’ve forgotten the most important thing is to ship values to users. Users don’t care how well the codes are, how perfect the architecture we use, users need the product to make their lives better.

Engineers should strike the balance between the perfect technical standard of the product and the speed and values of the product which ships to the target users.

I would call it Product Mindset.

Engineers with product mindset helps business to narrow the gap between tech and non-tech world.

Product Engineering Team

As an individual contributor, time is limited. I cannot produce unlimited outputs alone. I should have a team, a product engineering team. But different people have different thought, different ways to solve problems.

The ways to work as a team become the key to success. Luckily, I had a chance in my current workplace to try out. So far I have concluded some points helping.

Set up the culture

Team culture is the most important one. Team culture is the core values, working behaviors shared by the team. Teammates commonly share similar attributes that empower the team towards the same goals. If teammates cannot align with the culture. It produces frictions on cooperation, poor communications and poor outputs. For example, the team culture emphasises flat hierarchy without long approval process from level-to-level. If the new joiner has the strong belief on deep hierarchical organization, most likely the new joiner would have many conflicts with the current teammates. They might have many arguments, and no trust among teammates. The team has no dynamic to maximize outputs.

For hiring, Cultural fit is crucial no matter how good the candidate’s technical skills be!

Clear visions and goals

A clear vision can guide the team to focus on what they need to do. Without visions and goals, the team loses the purpose and target to work for. A clear vision or goal often has incentive. It motivates the team to work harder.

Setting up more challenging goals can bring more motivations and satisfactions to all the teammates.

Effective processes and workflows

Code practices, CICD pipelines, code review processes, etc. I think many developers know how they are important for the team. Yes! Effective processes and workflows make the team more efficient. Processes and workflows also need to evolve with the team. Team keeps changing with new joiners, processes and workflows also.

Always finding ways to improve your processes and workflows.

Effective Collaboration

With collaboration, it always 1+1 > 2. Why? One person has one idea. Two people has 2? Not really, two people can discuss their ideas to have 3 or more ideas! More effective the collaboration is, more ideas coming out. It really helps to solve business problems better and faster.

Final Words

I am glad that I can try out how to become more impactful as an engineering lead with my current job. I am building the team with the above 4 things. Fortunately, it goes smooth so far. I believe I have more to learn. I will keep reading books, checking out good articles or even seeking for good mentors.

Keep Learning, keep growing

I hope this piece of little sharing can inspire someone to think bigger, to become an impactful one.