The next time a decision is being made, reflect on your newfound knowledge, and think of a question that can push others to challenge the assumptions that support their logic. If a certain feature is hard to build, ask how they would build it and where it would break. You may be able to provide additional context (e.g. the customer doesn't care about an edge case they are worried about). Or you may be swiftly shut down. That's okay! You will undoubtedly learn something new for the next time. Iterate.
Product-minded engineers like to understand the "why?" behind all things. Why build this feature for the product, why not the other one? Product-minded engineers like talking with people outside engineering, learning about what and why they do. They are smooth communicators, making it clear they're interested in learning more about how other disciplines work. I frequently see them grabbing coffee, lunch, or doing a hallway chat with non-engineers. Juggling both the product and engineering tradeoffs and the impact of each is a unique strength product-minded engineers have. After rollout, they still actively engage with product managers, data scientists, and customer support channels, to learn how the feature is being used in the real world.
People, in general, are terrible at valuing their time, perhaps because for most people monetary compensation for one's time is so detached from the event of spending one's time. Most time we spend isn't like deliberate practice, with immediate feedback. We focus so much on product-market fit, but once companies have achieved some semblance of it, most should spend much more time on the problem of product-market unfit. Twitter the product/app has hit its invisible asymptote. Twitter the protocol still has untapped potential. The most obvious path to this is Groups, which can subdivide large graphs into ones more unified in purpose or ideology. Google+ was onto something with Circles, but since they hadn't actually achieved any scale they were solving a problem they didn't have yet. In addition, perhaps there is a general limit to how far a single feed of random content arranged algorithmically can go before we suffer pure consumption exhaustion. Perhaps seeing curated snapshots from everyone will finally push us all to the breaking point of jealousy and FOMO and, across a large enough number of users, an asymptote will emerge. Seduction is a gift, and most people in technology vastly overestimate how much of customer happiness is solvable by data-driven algorithms while underestimating the ROI of seduction. just because a given person's product intuition might hit on the right moment at the right point in history to create a smash hit, it's rare that a single person's frame will move in lock step with that of the world. How many creatives are relevant for a lifetime? Pattern recognition is the default operation mode of much of Silicon Valley and other fields, but it is almost always, by its very nature, backwards-looking. One can hardly blame most people for resorting to it because it's a way of minimizing blame In my experience, the most successful people I know are much more conscious of their own personal asymptotes at a much earlier age than others. They ruthlessly and expediently flush them out. One successful person I know determined in grade school that she'd never be a world-class tennis player or pianist. Another mentioned to me how, in their freshman year of college, they realized they'd never be the best mathematician in their own dorm, let alone in the world. Another knew a year into a job that he wouldn't be the best programmer at his company and so he switched over into management; he rose to become CEO. By discovering their own limitations early, they are also quicker to discover vectors on which they're personally unbounded.
There’s a lot of advice on product floating around out there.But something I don’t see enough (and what I wish I learned earlier) is to start developing a personal philosophy on product - both what makes good product and how to build it.— Avneesh Kohli (@avneeshk91) September 23, 2018
