Do Not Neglect Product Knowledge!

Introduction:

This week’s blog post is all about ‘The bigger picture’. Yes we’re tech professionals, yes we write code and work with fancy tools and technologies however it’s all for a bigger purpose. Read on to find out some important things to be aware of.

As always, before we get into this week’s blog post, please make sure to applaud, comment and share with your friends.

Happy Reading!

So who is this blog post aimed at?

This is for tech professionals in a role where they deal with external clients (The outside world).

I’d say this post applies less so to those in roles such as DevOps Engineer; Cloud Engineer; SRE Engineer … as these roles tend to be purely technical and where the consumers of their work are internal to the company.

Why Product Knowledge is Key:

Once you start working, you realise that production codebases are huge.

If you’re just starting out in your career then chances are, it’ll be a completely new experience. Depending on your company’s sector, there’ll be various phrases/acronyms thrown around and it’s going to take time to get used to them.

Now going back to the point of this blog post. The reason I’m making it is because when starting a new job, you need to look at things in a few different ways:

How will I get accustom to this new way of working?

Who will consume my work?

How does the code relate to the real world? (Main point of this blog post, much easier said than done!!).

This list is not exhaustive but it’s supposed to get you thinking deeper about the code that you right. Working as a Software Engineer, it’s really easy to just think about the code and the technologies however you have to remember that it’s all part of something bigger.

Going back to one of my earlier points, code bases are huge and it’s important to know how your changes impact the overall system. When dealing with interfaces; service layers; repositories; callbacks; webooks … there is a lot of information thrown at you but taking the time to study the codebase first pays off in the long-run.

I’ll be the first to admit that in the past, I made the mistake of rushing to code but nowadays, I spend a lot more time studying the existing code. Clarity is key and it might feel less productive however it pays off in the long run.

Conclusion:

All in all, this week’s blog post has turned into a bit of a brain dump about product knowledge. My point still stands though and it’s clear that knowledge about the whole system (Which will include using non-technical sources) is far more beneficial than having a fixated knowledge just on tech.

Coming off the back of a Computer Science degree, it’s easy to stay within a bubble of ‘the technical world’ however it’s important to break out and think from different perspectives.

Final Things:

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this article!

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