Operational Skills Triangle
Product and Engineering teams are a common feature in technology companies, usually operating together, if not as a single team then closely coupled teams.
Operating any business requires a large number of tasks to be accomplished. In small businesses, generalists wear many hats. As a business grows, the depth and complexity of tasks grows, requiring an increasing amount of specialized knowledge.
For Product and Engineering teams, these may be broadly classified as capability in the following domains:
- Business or customer domain, defining revenue generating product.
- Technical domain, implementing or executing to enable product vision.
- Management domain, ensuring all the parts are working together harmoniously.
All three are necessary to some extent or another, and if specialists are not available to fill the roles, generalists have to ensure necessary activities are accomplished.
Here’s one way to view the balance of various skills which might be necessary to operate in Product & Engineering in a technology company:
The scales are relative, each person, from the newest, most junior individual contributor, to VP or CTO of product or engineering should be able to find a point in the triangle.
My hunch is that as companies grow larger, most people in the company migrate to one of the vertices, and the middle part of the triangle becomes increasingly depopulated. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. In my experience, the further apart the roles in this triangle, the larger the inferential distance, increasing communication overhead.
The need for increasongly specialization tends to grow with a company, but some roles will need to keep a strong generalist mindset.