How To Make Your Engineers More Product Oriented?

Product-oriented engineers are sought after in every organisation. They are all around teams players, and they don’t just write codes. You can think about product oriented engineers as the owner of the product. They work on the back end, but they are also in the frontlines, communicating with the customers.

Product-oriented engineers are like the chefs who cook the food in the kitchen but also serves it to customers as a waitress. Serving to the customers allows chefs to communicate and get feedback from the customers. Armed with input gathered directly from customers will enable chefs to improve their recipes in the kitchen. You can apply this to engineers as well, by being product oriented, engineers can get a holistic view of the product and discover opportunities to improve it.

Creating a team full of product-oriented engineers is a challenging task to achieve. Here you can find the tips that would help you to build your dream team.

Put Them In Frontlines

You need to make your engineers communicate with your customers. If you want your engineers to have an understanding of your product and make better decisions to improve on it, then it’s essential that they should be communicating with the customers and listen to some of the problems customers are facing.

Best chefs are the ones who cook the food and serve it to customers to hear their feedbacks directly, same goes for the engineers as well. It is always better to get the feedback from the customer itself.

Understand User Behaviour

If engineers want to be involved in the product strategy then its imperative to understand how your users behave while using your product. The only goal of the engineering team should not be finishing the product. The primary goal should be creating the best possible product ever. To do that you need to have an understanding of your customer’s behaviours so that you can measure the impact your product created.

If you are already collecting user data from your products, then there is no reason why you can’t allow your engineers to analyse user behaviour with relevant tools.

Don’t Isolate Your Engineering Team From the Product Team

If you want your engineers to be product oriented, it wouldn’t be right o isolate them from the product and design teams. Most of the organisations have various roles such as product teams engineering teams, customer experience team, design team and so on. All of these roles have clear job definitions, and everyone knows their roles well.

This kind of organisations are excellent regarding structuring, but this scenario is not the best if you want your engineers to be involved in the product part. Don’t isolate your engineering teams from the product teams. They should be involved with product and design teams to have a better understanding of your product.

Encourage Contribution

If you want your engineers to become product oriented, then you should provide a work environment which lets them contribute to other departments. If you don’t have an organisation where people can not cross their boundaries to help other teams, then you might be missing out on many good ideas.

You need to have cross-functional teams. Back-End engineers should be able to contribute to the front-end engineers provided that they have an idea. Or engineering teams shouldn’t be afraid to the product or design teams.

Creating a great product starts with building a great team, and great teams are filled with people who are not afraid to experiment and contribute.