Reading and sharing thoughts on product development is one way we feed our product culture at Hemnet. This spring in our weekly product development book club we discussed the relationship between engineering and product, feeding product development with data, and how other companies work.

Product culture and engineering culture

We have been discussing about how to structure a product development organization this spring. What does it mean to be product lead or engineering-led? How can we talk about product debt in a deeper way, and what are the latest trends in engineering? We have been reading some thought-provoking articles :

• Code-centric vs product-goal-centric. I got really provoked by this article that in my eyes presents engineering and product as a dichotomy. We discussed about the different phases that Hemnet have been through in its history and the current challenges of tackling bigger technical project being product-led

• Some tips to identify product-led companies

• I discovered the concept of chaos engineering via this podcast, finding fascinating the approach of proactively breaking things instead of proactively trying to avoid failure. Worth a listen even for the one of us who do not work hands-on with platform questions

• Tech debt was the topic of this article. We discussed how we can effectively talk about tech debt in our product team to create alignment on what we are investing our time on. We also touched on responsibility and who should be the advocate for aligning the team around different types of tech debt investment

Data-driven development

Data, data, data…all want to be data-driven, but is there a risk of obsessing over data? A hot topic this spring was about how to use data in product development: how much data do you need to make decisions, when and how to A/B test, what is the purpose of prototypes, and many more goodies.

• Marty Cagan on discovery made us reflect on the balance of putting too much time in testing vs developing directly one solution. Our experience is that we tip on one or the other, how to strike the right balance?

• A visualization framework to classify teams based on their approach to data was the starting point for us to discuss where we think our teams stand on this 4 quadrant scale

• We were on a winning streak of A/B tests and started to think if we had to dare more. This article on radical experiments was a way to get our thoughts going

• Which kind of decision type are you? Decision-driven or data-driven? This article was a really nice way to reflect on what is needed to drive our work forward (https://techno-sapien.com/blog/decision-driven)

How do other companies work?

Reading about other companies’ ways of working and get tips from the inside is always a luxury. These are some gold links we have found and talked about

• The importance of a product vision and how they use it at Air B&B

• Basecamp on how they organize their company and on some of the bold decisions they have been taking that influence their company culture.

• A fantastic Twitter thread on the conception of Facebook photos

• Instagram growth journey was the topic of this video with some interesting thoughts on product-market fit, cutting corners, and the ideas behind their result ranking