Insights
Understanding the role of product engineering
Miguel Garcia, Chief Technical Officer, UST Product Engineering
Product engineering requires a strong product development mindset. It should strategically choose technology, architecture, and design principles, followed by flexible engineering solutions.
Miguel Garcia, Chief Technical Officer, UST Product Engineering
Product engineering is a comprehensive framework that ensures companies maximize the value they get from a product throughout its entire lifecycle.
Recent technology developments like AI, automation, no-code and low-code development have impacted product engineering, making it even more important to have a battle-tested approach.
Every year, companies and entrepreneurs launch thousands of new software products. While many succeed above their creator's wildest dreams, others fail because they were built incorrectly or poorly, misaligned on pricing versus value, did not appeal to a wide-enough audience, or failed in other ways.
Even the biggest, most successful companies have had some underwhelming products in their company's lifetime. One way to improve one's chances of creating lasting products that consumers love is to invest in and hone a product engineering mindset.
It's not a case of companies failing to appreciate their product operations. Indeed, most companies understand that the "crown jewel" creates the core value on which the company is based. If their process is flawed, it's often because they don't account for all of the intangibles that go into digital product innovation, excellent product engineering: quality processes and automation, the capability to rapidly bring new features to market, integration with other software, scalability, security, continuous integration and deployment and others.
What is Product Engineering?
Product engineering is a comprehensive framework that ensures companies maximize the value they get from a product throughout its entire lifecycle. Put another way- it's productizing ideas. Companies can only survive on innovation if they can turn ideas into concepts into products. Product engineering.
Let's discuss the three main areas of product engineering, demonstrating the breadth of knowledge needed for a company to succeed.
Creating new products - Few companies can coast along on a product or two, especially in a competitive market. Companies must continually identify and build new products to appeal to changing customer demands and societal trends. Product design is seldom easy - before a product is shipped, it must be prototyped and go through multiple testing and quality assurance rounds.
It requires focus group testing, experimentation, design thinking, technology architecture, and a host of other efforts that must work together. Companies and their engineering departments need a sound strategy and the right partner to help implement it.
Transforming legacy products and platforms - As companies age, so do their technologies and products. Not all products need to be created from scratch. Indeed some of the best decisions a company can make are to decide whether they need to create something new or they can upgrade an existing legacy product through app modernization.
Rationalizing systems - Product creation and legacy transformation do not occur in a vacuum. Over time, organizations can sometimes create several disjointed systems. Updating and modernizing them could ensure the product engineering process is delivered on time. Put another way, a company's ability to consistently produce meaningful products and ensure all are made without defects or delays requires a strong and validated system that underpins all development.
Product engineering, therefore, requires a strong product development mindset. It should strategically choose technology, architecture, and design principles, followed by flexible engineering solutions.
Approach to Product Engineering
As you can see, product engineering transformation is about more than just making new products. It's about creating a fundamental framework for how to be a product-oriented company. It involves, among other approaches:
Identifying white spaces:
product engineering is as much about identifying the products and services that don't yet exist as working on those that do. Engineers can use their expertise with other products and competitive analysis to help companies identify new products and audiences.
Prioritizing features a product should have:
Software products, for instance, often release their solutions as minimally viable products (MVPs) where they can either push updates or ask users to download them. Tangible product companies increasingly have to instead continually monitor the potential for bloat and make tough decisions on what features truly make the product valuable.
Ensure there is a product-market fit:
Once the company has the idea for a new concept, it's essential to put time and effort into determining what audience exists for it and whether there is sufficient demand to meet costs and ultimately turn a profit. Increasingly, companies are creating products or services that have recurring subscriptions attached to them, so the market considerations must also include whether customers will continue paying for repeat services.
Imbuing security throughout the entire product lifecycle:
Any product that connects to the internet is susceptible to security attacks. The rise of DevSecOps means that product engineering teams work directly with IT and security professionals to build security best practices from the ground up in coordination with product ideation and prototyping.
Any successful product or platform engineering approach incorporates all of the above. But many things can get in the way of successful product engineering.
Product engineering succeeds when it's part of a framework that establishes clear goals, anchors product development and legacy transformation to key business objectives, and is iterative and adaptable to changing dynamics. It also requires the right skillsets with internal teams or external partners (ideally both).
Often, legacy teams managing legacy products need help embracing and adopting new technologies.
Above all, product engineering strategy must provide as much structure and predictability as possible, minimizing surprises or dead ends. Succeeding means better serving customers, improving productivity, and driving cost savings while beating the competition to market with new product lines and updated offerings.
Product development can appear adrift if these pieces do not work simultaneously. When that happens, companies will often produce substandard product quality or find that their products fail to drive business goals forward. Successful product engineering combines the right talent, structure, and framework that leads to repeatable success.
Read our eBook 'Harnessing the product engineering mindset' to learn more about our unique approach to product engineering transformation and how we serve our clients.
In it, you'll learn software product engineering best practices and how the major components work together and understand how working with the right partner can supercharge your business.