Mindset Diversity in Product Engineering Teams
By: Suresh Marur
Tags: Diversity In Tech, Leadership, Team Building, Product Development

Photo by Raphael Rychetsky on Unsplash

A rose is a rose is a rose.. is a popular poetic expression. By extension one would be inclined to declare “An engineer is an engineer is an engineer”. Such a statement while sounding poetic would be terribly wrong.

The genus of software engineers contains many species within. And as a leader of a product engineering team, it is important to understand these species, their traits and behaviours. Any real product will have to confront varied situations in the rough and tumble of the marketplace — diverse product teams will require the strengths of each of these species to thrive. Having a healthy mix of all the species makes for healthy herd.

Abstractionists — Product engineering is an art where you are not building to requirements. You are building to needs. Given this reality, there are a class of engineers who can look beyond the immediate need as stated by the product managers/owners and anticipate patterns that they will design for. Such engineers will think in patterns, abstractions and will ask probing questions to understand the motivations for the need and look to establish the boundaries of the problem. They will often build solutions that will extend beyond the boundaries specified and build in the flexibility to change.

Such engineers need patient listening and answering their questions. This is well worth the time spent because the rewards are non-linear. You will often be surprised on how future needs will be met much faster than you may have anticipated.

What you do have to watch out for in such engineers is analysis paralysis. The ability to abstract has the downside of such engineers over thinking the problem and over engineer or make systems overly complex. These engineers also often struggle when thrown into production issues and they would get stuck theorizing as opposed to digging in and looking for root causes.

Realists — these are your WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) engineers. They look at problems as they are and will quick dig in and start solving them. Ideally suited for close bounded problems they are very good at making improvements to existing systems and also troubleshoot problems in production.

Abstractionists will often struggle to work with Realists and consider them “short-sighted” or “impulsive”. As a team leader, you will need to watch for this dynamic and help resolve with sound judgement.

Connectors — Engineers being quintessential problem solvers, often tend to work alone. They typically don’t like meetings that are not discussing technical problems. However, there are a class of engineers who have the ability to communicate in others’ language. They are the connective tissue between these natural silo thinkers and will help bring clarity between competing ideas. Connectors could lean towards being natural abstractionists or Realists. They are more often than not realists though. As a team leader, you will naturally lean-in to Connectors when things don’t move or when there is time pressure and there is a need to rally people and get going under pressure.

When it comes to promoting engineers to team leadership or people leadership positions, Connectors are a natural fit.

Finishers —Engineers love a challenging problem and get impatient with repetitive/grunt work. However, in any real business problem, there will be ‘not-so-fun” work that needs to get done. This will often be the last 5% of the problem and unless completed, you don’t have fit and finish. Many teams struggle with this phase and engineers will want to move to the next cool thing. There are however some engineers who will want to finish things. They will get down to do the dirty laundry and painstakingly get the team over the line. As a team leader, its essential you identify and recognize these efforts. The finishers are often unsung heroes who go unnoticed. Rewarding such efforts and making an example is key to ensure the right work ethics are promoted in the team.

As you can imagine, any real team will need engineers with all these mindsets. As a leader you yourself will have one of these mindsets. Don’t fall into the trap of building a flock that looks like you. Bring in the diversity in mindsets and have the wisdom to recognize and grow all these mindsets.

Footnote: I have often seen good team leaders become the finishers themselves. Such leaders showcase the pride of getting the job to the finish line and lead by example. After a few iterations of being an example, team members will start taking up finishing work with pride.