Engineers often benefit from having more of a product mindset. The TLDR of this page is: Help out your PM instead of throwing tasks over the fence.

Develop good taste

We are exposed to great and bad products all the time. It’s easy to go on auto pilot mode and not pay attention to the websites or apps we use, in which case they are somewhat succesful in delivering a frictionless experience.

Pause once in a while and pay attention. Improving your taste means being able to detect, define, and communicate what makes a product good. And in the wonderful days of the internet there’s no shortage of nerds who dissect and create guides on all sorts of topics.

When you have an opinion on what makes a great product you get closer to building a great product.

Empathy for your users

Talk to your users, use your own product, develop an understanding of the domain you are working in.

Depending on the product you are building this can be more or less difficult. Learning how someone is using your product will almost always yield worthwhile results.

Be engaged

Now you have good taste and an understanding of your users, time to share your thoughts with the team. Be mindful who your audience is, are you presenting to a group of engineers or to business leaders? Tailor your delivery to what’s important to your audience.

Be curious outside of your scope

Depending on the size of your company there’s a whole world outside of your immediate team. Be curious what other teams are shipping and how they are solving problems so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. I’ve also found it eye opening to follow the money and understand which features exactly are driving revenue.

Project management

Knowing what to build is great. Product Managers often need to fill the project management responsiblity as well. Help them out by having a good sense of how the implementation is progressing. You don’t need to be able to answer every single detail but be prepared to answer if the project is on track and what needs to happen if the team is falling behind.