phildiniJun 29, 2025

Time for another "Phildini Livetoots a talk that already happened"!

This time: Amanda Savluchinske's #DjangoConUS2024 talk "Product 101 for Techies and Tech Teams"

https://djangotv.com/videos/djangocon-us/2024/product-101-for-techies-and-tech-teams-with-amanda-savluchinske/

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Product 101 for Techies and Tech Teams with Amanda Savluchinske

In this talk, I intend to cover basic product concepts with the goal of sparking engineers' interest in how their work can have a greater impact in their users' lives. In my opinion, everyone in tech should be able to speak a little of their colleagues' language so that we …

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Two parts of the talk: becoming more product-minded and diving deeper into the product domain

There's a cheat sheet at https://bit.ly/cheatsheet-product-101

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Cheatsheet

Cheatsheet Stakeholders: Individuals or groups with an interest or involvement in a project or organization. Product Life Cycle: The stages a product goes through from introduction to withdrawal from the market. Mission: A statement defining the purpose and reason for an organization's existen...

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Part 1: Becoming more product-minded

What does your PM really want?

PM's job is to make good decisions about strategy, empower the rest of the team / company, and performing their own research /design work

What they want?
- A team interested in the strategy
- Genuine interest in solving problems
- Empathy with end users

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Team's job is not to be product experts, that's the PM's job.

But the team does need interest in strategy, attention to details and quality, and empathy for the user experience from start to finish

These are generalizations! It's important to chat with _your_ PMs to understand exactly what they want.

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How do we bridge the gap between PMs and tech teams?

One way is to figure out if you are or are inclined to be a product-minded engineer! It can be extremely valuable, but it is a form of specialization in its own right, and can have positive and negative career impacts.

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How do you become a product-minded engineer?

- Be interested in the business and its user base
- Stay curious
- Provide relevant input
- Be an ally to your PM

If you practice these things, you'll also be able to work more autonomously, which is a career bonus.

Additionally, product-minded engineers can often create more elegant or efficient solutions to the business problem

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Part 2: Diving into product!

Start by understanding the product strategy, and the product lifecycle.

Cycle:
- Introduction
- Growth
- Maturity
- Decline

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Introduction:

This is the time to really make sure you as an engineer understand the strategy and why you're implementing a feature or product. What are we proving by building this?

Growth:

Moving towards profitability on the feature, however that's measured. You can help by encouraging experimentation, propose new ideas that come from user feedback.

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Maturity:

Peak "profitability". You can help by keeping an eye on trends and find ways to keep the existing product feeling fresh. Keep collaboration flowing.

Decline:

Sales decrease, market share decreases. You can help by being proactive for solutions on reviving the existing product or finding a whole new revenue stream.

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Jun 29, 2025 at 10:40pmWeb
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Think of strategy as a funnel.

Mission & Vision is the most broad description of what's trying to be accomplished by the business

Strategy is more focused on outcomes

Goals more focused still

Roadmaps should be narrow and concrete.

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Digging in: Mission & Vision.

Mission is WHY the company exists.

Vision is WHAT the company is trying to achieve with their mission.

The clearer these are to you as a developer, the more strategic and autonomously you can operate.

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Strategic Plan: the specific beats general.

Example here: Yahoo's Peanut Butter manifesto from 2006, which is worth looking up for more detail.

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Goals: You've probably encountered some form of these most often as an engineer!

There are common frameworks like:

- OKRs (Objectives and Key-Results)
- SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound)

(Editor's note: OKRs get a bad rap because, like Agile, they're often very poorly implemented. Check out https://phildini.dev/touring-breakfast-factory-thoughts-high-output-man for my take)

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Touing the Breakfast Factory: Thoughts on High Output Management - phildini.dev

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently moved from being a Senior Software Engineer to a Team Lead. I’m fortunate to have received the advice

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Roadmaps exist to get everyone on the same page for what's being worked on, and prioritizing allocation of resources.

Roadmaps have their own frameworks and timelines, like Now-Next-Later.

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With an understanding of the company's strategy, how do we use this to build the right things?

We start with personas and customer journey mapping.

Personas: fictional representations of a target audience. They are (deliberately!) stereotypes, with characteristics and demographics.

Customer Journey Maps: The steps a user/persona goes through trying to accomplish a task. Including things like how the user becomes aware of solutions, and how they remain sticky to a product.

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Once you have ideas on how to solve issues in the user journey map, you need to test those ideas, through user research of small a/b tests in the product

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Once you're feeling confident you have the right direction of ideas to solve the problems. it's time to do tech tests.

This is where engineers, especially senior engineers, get brought in to think about the feasibility of the full solution, raising concerns and suggesting alternatives.

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Once the product is shipped, what next?

Metrics! How do you know if the product is actually meeting goals? How are you measuring it?

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And that's the talk! Thanks for joining us for this #SlowpokeLiveToots of a #DjangoConUS2024 talk.

If you want to support me and see more of these, you can support the largest civic meeting db for the US and Canada, @civicband, at https://opencollective.com/civicband

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