The New Class of Creatives
I recently listened to an episode of the Andreessen Horowitz podcast entitled, “Developers as Creatives” featuring Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio.
Highly recommend listening to the episode in its entirety, but tl;dr it discusses the importance of leveraging the creative faculties of Engineers. Too many companies treat devs as “code monkeys” whose sole job is to put on Bose noise-cancelling headphones, retreat to a basement, and execute on perfectly spec-ed product requirement docs.
I’ve had the good fortune of working in Product roles at several successful technology companies, but I think Nomad Health does the best job I’ve seen of supporting developers in their pursuit of ideation and original thought.
To my mind, this begins with an Engineering culture of ownership. If developers understand and own business outcomes, it creates a symbiotic loop with PMs of delivering quality product.
Though it’s taken some time, I’ve tried hard to unwind everything I knew about the product development process — articulating every requirement, edge case, and error state down to the pixel and hex code value. Rather, I present Eng with a problem and let them help me arrive at the solution.
I’ll admit that this approach doesn’t work at every company, nor at every stage of growth. At early-stage companies, clear product requirements are vital to creating order out of the chaos; at late-stage companies, multi-layered Prod/Eng orgs may not support this kind of free-form thinking.
In my opinion, there are 3 pre-reqs to testing this culture of ownership:
- Clearly articulated Objectives & Key Results (OKRs): If Eng knows what metrics their team owns, and pays close attention to those metrics, it provides guardrails for open-ended technical ideation.
- Contractual agreement on technical debt: If Eng believes they have been provided the time they need to tackle tech debt, they won’t be fighting tooth & nail for “their” initiatives during sprint planning.
- Implicit trust between PM<>EM: This one is perhaps the hardest to build. If your EM trusts that the problem you’ve chosen to bring to the team is the right one, and you trust that they’ll get the job done, the rest falls into place.
I’m sure this isn’t an exhaustive list, and product development process is not and should not be one-size-fits-all (your mileage may vary).
If you have ideas or want to talk shop, reach out! I’m all ears…
Will McCalpin leads Product for Communications and Mobile at Nomad Health. We are hiring! https://nomadhealth.com/careers/
