Product <> Software.
A Thread.
A Thread.
Software (Wikipedia): A collection of data or computer instructions that tell the computer how to work
Product (Wikipedia) - An object or system made available for consumer use; it is anything that can be offered to a market to satisfy the desire or need of a customer
Product (Wikipedia) - An object or system made available for consumer use; it is anything that can be offered to a market to satisfy the desire or need of a customer
- Building software may or may not be a subset of building a product.
- Building a product may or may not entail building software.
- Building software doesn't always mean building a product
- Building a product may or may not entail building software.
- Building software doesn't always mean building a product
A product engineer builds keeping the needs of the consumer at the forefront and solves complicated engineering problems to achieve consumer usable milestones and goals. Doing this while keeping reliability as a top priority as well. She also questions the requirements!
A software engineer is someone who engineers the software, where the focus is on the software and not on the user. The responsibility is to make the software work.
A product manager is someone who manages the 'product' & works towards converting consumer needs into a solution that makes an incremental change in their lives. Making sure that the software is done and is robust is a part of this responsibility. Part, not the whole.
A software manager is someone who ensures that the software is written with the expected quality, within resource constraints and meeting anticipated/provided requirements.
A product is measured by metrics defined by the business and the market both in the short term and long term. The underlying metrics of software reliability are necessary for success but not sufficient for success.
A software is measured by reliability over anything else. The other metrics could be compliance on resources. That too may not be valid for open source.
Building a product includes finding the why, understanding the user need, creating a solution around it, shipping it and iterating on it depending on the needs of the user.
Building software includes defining the architecture, making language choices, writing the software and monitoring the reliability of the software.
Product design means how a consumer will traverse through the product from start to end. This includes marketing, service design, customer care in case of issues and of course the app or web or physical design itself
Sofware design means how the different systems & component within a software interact with each other for the software to be reliable and scalable
Most of these points are obvious for anyone who has built a software product. However, at times the overlap between software and product is large. Young PMs forget that they manage products not software which neither helps the engineers nor the consumers.
A lot of leaders also mistake their PMs as SMs & limit conversations to 'timelines' and 'estimates'. This creates a ripple effect. In such setup, PMs start over pushing the engg teams on - 'How long will it take' conversations which impacts product creation process -vely.
Software is software. Product is product.
Softwares run products. Products run companies.
They do overlap, but they are not the same thing. Choose wisely what you want your teams to think as.
Softwares run products. Products run companies.
They do overlap, but they are not the same thing. Choose wisely what you want your teams to think as.
Thoughts?
