Some months back I had the opportunity to engage in discussion with @yoavflam who is my colleague ,leader in the organization I work for and a great teacher at the same time. That conversation changed my perspective on how I see technology, the code I write and eventually lead me to study more about product engineering.
I cannot fully remember the question word by word but I remember sharing with him my perspective on types of organizations and wanting to know his perspective. After working for few years in the industry and mostly in those organizations which are operationally complex I got an impression that may be there are different views to see the organization and practices differ from one type of organization to organization, for example technology company with banking license and bank where technology is a department to support the operations. As a naive software engineer I was differentiating between organizations which are very strong advocates of top notch engineering quality in comparison to what I was experiencing. I was curious to know opinion from someone who has seen industry inside out.
He addressed my curiosity with a question "would you like to build something that no one will use ? or would you like to build something that people will use ?"
Of course the later.This question which @yoavflam asked pushed me to think about technology in a very different way and later on my curiosity took me to two phenomenal books that was introduced to me by another colleague.
- The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt
- The Principle of Product Development Flow by Donald G. Reinertsen.
I learn with time that goal of the organization is to make money,increase life cycle profits like Jonah teacher of Alex showed him a different perspective of the goal of the manufacturing plant in the book the Goal.Likewise the robots in Alex's manufacturing plant is the technology that we built to solve some customer problem and when that problem is solved it should bring in some value for the organization at the end.
We often hear about organizations which are not profitable and burning cash and for that reason I have mentioned about life cycle profits, even these organizations are burning cash so they can be profitable one day in the economies of scale.
This conversation with @yoavflam ,some book readings and experiences has also helped me to see my role differently in the context of product engineering.I have an opinion that labels and job titles plays some role,something magical happens when you name it right.I don't have any research to prove this hypothesis. I am inclined to call people who build to solve customer problems product engineers. This gives a more clear context on the work they do.
In this series I will try to share my learning from both of the books mentioned above and compliment that with my experience of day to day to work.I will also be using few more books such as Team Topologies by Manuel Pais and Matthew Skelton and The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernback as references when required.
The reason for this cross reference is because the picture is complete with the customers that you build for, the colleagues that you build with, the ecosystem that you live in and the technology that you use if any to solve the customer problem.
Please feel free to disagree and comment and point out issues.
In the next episode I will be try to present my arguments on the decision making framework in product engineering
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