My brother mentioned that at BrightGauge we have two teams, one being the Growth Team (which he manages) and the other being the Product Team which is my responsibility. Though we all work very closely together, there are very distinct differences between the two teams.
As you can imagine, our product team has complete responsibility for building and maintaining... you guessed it... our product. The different functions that make up our product team are fairly well known in the software world but may not be to people outside the industry. So I’ll lay them out for you now:
Product Manager: makes sure that all engineering and design work is getting done properly and with thoughtful order.
This one is my personal responsibility and you can also think of this role as the “project manager”. In building agile software products, the role expands a bit more where the responsibility is making sure the team is building the right features, at the right time, and in the right order. Seems simple but I can assure this has yet to become a science. Other fun responsibilities of the Product Manager is to be the top quality assurance tester so as to make sure what is put in the pipeline to be developed and shipped does so at the acceptance levels we all would expect.
User Experience (UX) / User Interface (UI): This critical role builds the human interfaces and interactions within the platform… better explained as this person makes sure BrightGauge is user-friendly.
In any product team, this skill is one of the hardest to find because of the wildly broad expertise needed; it’s not just being a good artist or coming up with good ideas but it’s both of those as well the implementation of those ideas. It’s a blend of right brain and left brain thinking that very few individuals possess all together. And that’s not to mention the attention to the finest details in actually delivering that idea which needs to be something beautiful and incredibly useful. It’s a critical part of any product team and we are no different.
Back End Developers / Engineers / Architects: This group loves to turn ideas into living products; the code they write is running the most critical parts of our product.
The core of any software product is the architecture which can be translated into the systematic design and technologies used to run the product. This is where back end engineers live and for us this is the background of our Director of Engineering. I, and many others, call this area the “backend” because the code they write does not interface directly with the user. This function, especially with small teams like ours, also compromises development operations, which means they are responsible for keeping systems up 100% of time. Thankfully, services like Amazon Web Services take care of a lot of that system administration and network security, so the backend team can focus more on writing code instead of maintaining servers.
Front End Engineers: differentiated from the backend because these specialists know how to work with technology that is very browser focused (for web apps like ours).
It was once explained to me that the code being used to create amazing web experiences is like the wild, wild west. Where technology and approaches are so varied and changes constantly that we, like many others, need specialist who just live in and love this world. It’s not to say these same engineers couldn’t or don’t do backend work (or vice versa) but it’s more a division of expertise.
the Product team enjoying a lunch celebration
To close, I must also say that we thoughtfully named ourselves the product team versus what would be a traditional development or engineering team. The reason we call ourselves a “product” team is that every one of us works together to build a full product that adds real value to our customers. This means we aren’t just a group of engineers writing code to write code, or a designer trying create pretty designs. We are a cohesive team with many different specialties but have a singular goal of building an amazingly useful product for our customers.
