Episode #3 of Revisiting Product Engineering - Co creation

When two or more multiple people work together to a common problem I refer to this as co creation. In this blog I will try to evaluate this practice from multiple dimensions. This is based on my experience,observations and failures so far which can change in future based on my new learning.
I see this way of working from these dimensions.

1. Creating value individually or together.
2. Changing habits and building new ones.
3. System which empowers this style of working.
4. Group productivity or individual productivity.
5. Culture as everyone's responsibility.
6. Different skills level in the team.
7. Granularity of accountability.
8. Tactical empathy and team happiness.
9. The trap of single person knowledge.
10. Different styles of co creation.
11. Knowledge transfers in the team.

Culture as everyone's responsibility

For quite a long time product engineering community has been following the notion of concepts likebest practices. I think this has effected us so much that it is very easy to fall victim of the notion thatsome work should be done some way. It is the habits which are formed over the period of time. Our reflexes are built this way which we have to fight against. I would propose to call itcontext driven decisions. This enables us to have an understanding that whatever practices we choose is because of the context of we are in. If we change the context the practices might change. This idea gives us an understanding even the style of working is context dependent. What is important is context driven decisions which are agreed upon by the team. What I want to highlight here is that culture is not an individual's job. Do we have culture managers or culture owners ? It is everyone's responsibility to put effort and come to decisions based on the culture that we wish to have in the team. This is like gardening. Its not a one time effort. Its a continuous effort made by every member of the team to put effort for the garden they wish to have. Without the collective effort and team agreed upon context driven decisions any practice or any idea will not be able to succeed. Also like gardening is a continuous effort else the plants will die similarly the context is always changing. Culture is an evolving phenomenon which is a side effect of team's effort. This is the survey which reflects the impact of culture on people. I would leave this to you to think who is the culture owner ? Is it any individual in any role or is it the team as a whole ?