Product Teams and Product Engineers
One year ago, we were a different company. A company where releases were happening at a fast pace but results were coming in a very slow manner.
At that point, we had a company structure where Designers and Engineers were part of their core teams. There was no Product Owners and development of new features was happening horizontally across those core teams.
This created a lot of friction between the teams, especially since there was no clear ownership of the features, decisions were been made slowly.
At the same time, the whole process was time-consuming for everyone, especially for engineers since often they were part of several features. Which meant there was a lot of context switching happening while at the same time not been able to really go deep into any of the details of those features.
Enter Product Teams
Last summer, we shifted things for the better. Now, instead, we have product teams which basically are fully rounded teams with designers, platform engineers, mobile engineers, nutritionists and a product owner.
The idea is to have groups of people owning a specific feature of the app, this embraces ownership and enables innovation, you need to set them free as much as possible though, if someone is trying to revise the decisions the team makes, the slowness will come back and the results will get damaged.
Horizontally, we still need a set of rules across all teams that make things tie together, these rules are usually set by the core team and they are quite different between Mobile, Design and Platform. For example on Mobile, releases are every two weeks and features branches need to be approved, code reviewed and merged by Friday of the second week, in order to be included on the next release.
On another example. In the design team, you need to follow their design guidelines according to our brand. You get the point.
Product teams are not a new thing though, lots of companies/startups have this structure, although little companies know how to build those teams.
At Lifesum we currently have — without going into too many details — five teams: Growth, Plans, Health Profile, Search and Health Rating.
Now, all of these teams have engineers. Engineers that were meticulously selected to be part of these teams, to be Product Engineers.
Our Search for Product Engineers
Product Engineers are a new kind of animal. An animal that is hard to find.
These are engineers that are not only part of the team because they need to do the actual coding part. But now since they have a deeper stake on the feature they are building, they care how the user will interact with it and they understand how this relate to the overall vision of the company: Healthy living, simplified.
These enable them to bring smart tech into the table when they interact with designers and product owners on the things they need to figure out for their feature.
This is key for us because it helps the team figure out what they need to build in a more collective way, instead of having the Product Owners figuring everything and planning for an unreasonable roadmap.
Product Engineers have shaped the way our culture is built, a mix of passion and collaboration.
Lifesum is looking for product engineers that are creative builders. If you are someone passionate about building on the corner of tech and health, we will love to talk to you.
