Product vs. Tech

Surprisingly often people are asking me: „Does it make sense to separate tech and product into different departments?“ For me that sounds a little bit like “Does it make sense to separate judiciary from executive?” Although I don’t have the format of a Montesquieu I want to share my thoughts about it.

Tech – The Executive

The task of a software engineer is to write awesome software. Ok, that’s maybe a little bit too generic. He designs an architecture that meets the requirements of the product. He decides about technologies and languages. He writes tests, automates processes, specifies APIs and tweaks around with protocols. He collects badges on stackoverflow, has more followers on github than on twitter and he contributes to a couple of open source projects. Watching him sitting in front of his screen(s!) gives you the impression he might suffer from ADHD because you neither understand what he is doing nor you get a glimpse of an idea how he is doing it because lots of windows and other weird things open, close and switch although he never touches his mouse.

Being a (good) software guy means being passionate about the things you do. Not being able to solve a problem will keep him awake and defocused the whole night.

Product – The Judiciary

The product manager is the guy everybody hates and wants to be friend with. His task is to understand the strategy of the company, the requirements of the market, the current needs of the different departments and he is able to predict the future. He morphs all this into a beautiful product and makes the company and the customers happy and future-proof. That sounds easy but actually he is in the middle of a couple of millstones. Instead of being a grain he needs to be a diamond resisting all the pressures coming from everywhere. He loves to communicate with all the stakeholders (customers, management, tech, operations, sales). He is tightly connected with marketing and he has no problem with saying “no”. He can perfectly balance operational and strategic goals. Like a gardener he cultivates his products and let them grow into big trees or cut them with all of their roots if he recognizes some illnesses that cannot be cured. He understands tech good enough to translate his ideas into blueprints that can be used by the software engineers to convert those into real products.

Separation of Powers

At a first glance, it looks like mixing tech and product would smoothen the product development process and reducing the communication overhead. But putting the tech department in charge of developing the product is the same as putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. Tech needs to be a stakeholder of product. The desire of doing a major rework, switching to a new cutting-edge data base technology, or enabling shortcuts for the GUI needs to be weighted out against timelines, market pressure and customer needs. The software engineers wants to bring the underlying technology to perfection. The product managers need to decide how much perfection can be afforded!

A software engineer is not able to do his best job if he is responsible for product. A product manager will not fight hard enough to push the technology to its best.  If you start a company you should separate these departments right from the beginning in order to balance quality and time-to-market. It gives you a good chance of doing the right things and doing the things right at the same time.