Most engineering organizations separate engineering and product leadership into distinct roles. This is usually ideal, not only because these roles benefit on distinct skills, but also because they thrive from different perspectives and priorities. It’s quite hard to do both well at the same time. This post takes a look at my high-level approach to product management for when you do happen to find yourself wearing both hats.| lethain.com
I’m speaking at Velocity on June 12th on ‘How Stripe invests in technical infrastructure’, and this is the rough outline of the content the talk will cover. I hope to see y’all there.| lethain.com
Standardizing on a given platform or technology is one of the most powerful ways to create leverage within a company: improve the tooling a bit and every engineer will get more productive. Exploration is, in the long run, an even more powerful force, with successes compounding over time. Developing an investment thesis to balance the ratios and timing of standardization and exploration is a core challenge of engineering strategy.| lethain.com
Many effective leaders I’ve worked with have the uncanny knack for working on leverage problems. In some problem domains, the product management skillset is extraordinarily effective for identifying useful problems, but systems thinking is the most universally useful toolkit I’ve found.| lethain.com