Products and Productization

At balena we are all product builders. We talk about owning a product, and what your product is. It’s our aim for everyone to identify a product and take ownership.

We’ll explain what defines a product and then guide product builders toward identifying their own, which could mean an existing product, or transitioning what they’re currently working on into product-form.

We’ll then explore what it looks like to be a product builder and what that could look like in practice.

To get started, you can also check out the full Product Builder presentation here.

Background

The product concept is intended as a way to organize ourselves around the work that we’re doing, and allow us to better work together. It allows smaller groups and individuals to take ownership of the work they’re doing day to day, to define a scope, define their own mission statement, and execute upon their own vision within that scope. As such, it’s a way for us to empower ourselves to make the best decisions for the work that we’re doing, to decide what features are a priority and to build them according to product roadmaps.

It’s a way for people to get far more value out of the work that we do and have a wider impact in the world by ensuring everything we do has value at the granular level and not just when it’s all pieced together into one larger product surface. At the same time, it is a way for us to all work together towards a shared vision and solve larger problems.

It’s a way for us to continue to embrace the loop concept, gather more feedback, facilitate more contributions from others, and iterate faster.

It’s a way to allow more focussed work and more autonomy by reducing the amount of context required and reducing the level of complexity by defining interfaces to other products. It reduces the testing and maintenance into smaller more manageable pieces.

In summary, there are a lot of benefits to this approach, some more visible than others. In a lot of cases the only change required is the approach taken to design and implementation. We should aim to always solve for the general use case instead of the specific, and so create chain reactions and gain the ability to provide value to the world that grows exponentially.