Product Ownership

I think a lot about the idea of product “ownership” in the true stewardship sense of the role. In the last decade I’ve been fortunate to transition from a largely technical role to something that aligns closer to a product owner construct. I take responsibility for the product and the solution without necessarily being the one with hands-on-keyboards. Sometimes I tinker just to remind myself how all these pieces come together, but for the most part my coding senses have atrophied and the world is looking far more complex from where I sit.

Technical Building Blocks

Modern software is an amalgamation. It’s a process of assembling parts and pieces from a vast collection of tools and work that’s been toiled over by thousands of people before you even get to start choosing what parts to build from. The basic ideas are the same as they’ve always been — most software can be boiled down to some extremely common patterns. I need data to go somewhere. I need an interface to interact with. I need to collect money, capture customer details, track what’s working and what’s broken.

Great product comes at the intersection between the capabilities of the technology and the alignment of the user’s goals and the product’s purpose.

Complexity

The trick of product complexity is that as a feature list grows linearly (one new feature at a time) the ability to both support and understand that product grows geometrically.