How to develop “Product thinking” for software engineers?
I have an imaginative world of software engineers who are great product thinkers. If this imaginative world exists, you put the “customer at the center” through the software development lifecycle, and many products will be delivered the best! I love that world!
Some excellent engineers I’ve worked with (in my team — I love my team) have shown vital signs of product thinking on par with product managers. You don’t need to be a “Product Manager” or a “Product Leader” to demonstrate product thinking. It is yet another muscle that you need to develop. Product thinking not only helps you understand the customers but also helps you show the business value of your work. This will ensure that you are doing everything for Product managers to develop ideas and specs for a problem and then start implementing rather, you think about the user problems you are trying to solve and your ideas and approaches to solve them. You are saving a lot of cycles by doing so and creating a significant influence and business value for your work!
I will add some tips that I have been guiding my engineers here that may help someone.
- Get involved in User research: Try to join user interviews or ask for the data so that you understand your product and user needs. Ask this question, can you please share what users are saying about the product?
- Work with the visual design team: Don’t wait for someone to give you readily available visual mockups, partner and work with designers (they are fantastic and put the user at the center), and understand their way of thinking and principles, learn the process of visual design, and then get to implementation.
- Get feedback: Please come out of that thinking that I build the best. There is always room for improvement in any outcome, be open, ask for feedback, and get feedback from stakeholders, product managers, and business leaders. This will ensure you are aligned with the goals.
- Out-of-the-box thinking: Think beyond the feature, the overall experience, and the user journey toward your feature. Now put yourself in the user's shoes. Will you consume this feature you build in your general day as a consumer?
- Learn and explore: What you are building is not rocket science (maybe)? There could be a competitive landscape, Ask your product managers and understand the competition, and this will help you identify opportunities to improve the experience.
- Know your product: Don’t just think about your feature and be siloed, think beyond that, understand the product, spend time, learn, and explore it. This will ensure you have fewer blindspots and a deeper understanding, and your outcomes will be very efficient.
- Iterate, Iterate, and Iterate: Iterate based on feedback until it meets the user's needs. Also, believe that the user's needs are generally basic and straightforward — period.
- Start with the problem: Ask yourself, “SO WHAT WHO CARES DAILY” (this quote came from a great leader I worked with :) — Not mine), We are engineers who jump into solutions, NO! Think about the problem, and focus on it consistently. No one cares about VS code/GIT or your code until it solves a problem!
- Business Goals: Do you know your product vision, strategy, and goals? If not, ask for them! Understand where you are heading, understand “WHAT DOES SUCCESS LOOK LIKE?” — Print it and see it daily. Have your own metrics to measure daily, weekly, and monthly success that align with business goals.
- GSD (Get stuff done with zero or less effort): Stay up to date on the trends in technology, ask yourself why you are writing so much code, think creatively, and innovate with low-code/no-code solutions or lesser code solutions or easily maintainable solutions with simple code.
- Pitch your thoughts: Challenge yourself to do a quick pitch. If you can pitch in 30 minutes, zoom out, reduce it to 15 minutes, then reduce it to 1 minute and 30 seconds. Think your CIO is in an elevator, and you only have 30 seconds to explain a problem and the solution. There will be many leaders who can help you with this. Ask for mentorship :)
I hope this is helpful to someone who wants to inculcate product thinking in their daily engineering life. It may be a bit difficult initially, but get the support you need, and you will enjoy it!
