Choosing A Role

This page is intended to help you choose a path within product delivery.

There are many roles and hats to wear. Across a career it’s probable one will traverse numerous roles and levels: for example being a doer on a team, product owner, technical lead, delivery lead and more. With time, we slowly figure out what we enjoy and focus our paths towards it.

For those that haven’t had the luxury of diverse roles or are new to product delivery, the first question I would ask you is:

Do you want to seek out or receive information?

Do you enjoy talking, doing, asking questions, figuring things out? What balance of talking and doing do you enjoy and how does your level map across to available roles?

Engineer

If you feel you’re 100% a general-good-doer that likes to receive direction, to be given requirements and crank out code then you’re likely suited do being an engineer on a team.

These people are focused on creating, finding solutions to requirements and delivering features of a product - they’re the reason you have an application to use.

They’re often allowed to have tunnel vision, to be in the weeds and are overcoming complexity in their day to day. Though it’s recommended they lift their head up and look at the wider picture from time to time, engineers are often deep in solving problems.

Do you want to receive or provide information?

The next roles build on seeking out information with the specific intention to share it. To act as a conduit and break down silos to empower people to get things done and be aware of what is happening across the business.

Business Analyst

If you enjoy understanding the wider business and processes you’re involved in, gaining holistic domain knowledge and drawing logical maps which other roles, including engineers, will use to understand a business - then business analysis may be for you.

I’ve worked with a number of BAs in different companies and they can be a life saver. A good BA pointed directly at the business, hunting down information, can logically structure the processes that make up a product or organisation in a digestible format. At times, a BA has the power to straighten spaghetti, separate it by length, colour and thickness. They help us understand the world we’re in.

Product Owner

A product needs a business owner, a representative that understands what the product is, how it fits with the business strategy and guides the path on what should be developed.

A team may not always have a product owner but someone should be wearing that hat to some degree: why are we here? What are we building? Without guidance and prioritisation from the business, chaos ensues.

Product owners work at all levels, they’re probing the business, they’re involved in the strategy asking questions as to where will we be in the next 6, 12 , 24 months - how their product fits the plan, building a roadmap and directing the team with a focus on short to medium term outcomes. This role is strongly aligned to seeking out information of the business strategy and working directly with decision makers to create a vision for the product and then align teams to prioritised outcomes.

Leadership

If you enjoy the hands on nature of a role but are asking:

Why are we here? What are we doing?

and challenging a business, validating that teams and individuals are doing the right thing, aligning people to the right outcomes then you’ll likely enjoy leadership.

Leadership involves creating an environment for others to succeed in. To remove or reduce uncertainty and discomfort. To provide clear direction and alignment to an outcome. To give a sense of belonging and that individuals are and feel valued.

There are many flavours of leadership but for product delivery we will look at two:

Tech Lead

If you enjoy seeking out information and requirements, using your technical knowledge to derive a solution, building a team and aligning them to the required outcome then you’ll likely enjoy technical leadership.

what, why and how are three of the biggest questions driving tech leads. They must have a good product engineering foundation, to know what is possible or even demonstrate the art of the possible. Their job is to understand the challenge presented by the business, poke it, question it and figure out the path forwards.

There are more facets and flavours to tech leadership roles, which we’ll dig deeper into in another article, but in general tech leadership requires seeking answers, translating them for the team and then guiding the technical delivery.

Delivery Lead

If you’re firmly in the what, why and when then look towards delivery leadership. These folks aren’t expected to understand the technical solution but will have an excellent understanding of why are we here and what is the outcome, what is the business value, though this a requirement for tech leads as well. The delivery lead may sit across teams or teams of teams. Senior tech leads may work with two to four teams (eventually becoming an engineering manager) but a delivery lead is orchestrating them all and looking more to the medium to long term of a product or organisation than the tech leads with short to medium term focus.

Delivery leads interface directly into the business, gaining understanding across different levels, from engineering teams up to the CTO, of what is the challenge, how can we work together to solve it and ultimately how will it be delivered (often with a rough time estimate).

Questions to ask yourself

If you can figure out what is the combination of what, why, how, and when that you enjoy, and the combination of seeking out, receiving or providing answers - you’ll narrow the scope of roles you enjoy.

These are questions I believe everyone should be asking, but how those questions are rooted in day to day activities and their frequency is what specialises or aligns you to a role.