At Happy Scribe, engineers are Product Engineers, not just engineers. This means that asides from being full-stack and able to work in any part of the architecture, they have product taste and can own the development of a feature from start to finish, with the necessary iterations in the middle, and talking to users.

Here are some product principles to keep always in mind:

Deep Work & Flow

Spending most of your time in long uninterrupted stretches of time, in an environment that you can really concentrate and get in flow is extremely important, and goes above all other priorities that you might encounter. Every engineer, at all times, should be able to spend most of her week in this setting.

There are many reasons why your deep work will be interrupted, and simple recipes to claim it back:

Recovering Deep Work

Good design is thorough down to the last detail

— Dieter Rams

A single detail can break the total experience. You can build a product that is great up to 95%, but missing the last 5% turns the complete value to 0%. Good product is exhaustively good.

• Example 1: I recently bought a bicycle pump which was 90% perfect. It filled my bike tires great, it was easy to use, attractive, matched my biking shorts and jersey. It was almost perfect. Except the designers used cheap plastic to secure the tube, which snapped almost immediately. Now the pump won’t snap onto my tire properly and the pump doesn’t function anymore.
• Example 2: I just bought a beautiful racing bike. It’s so lightweight and beautiful. Except there’s a pedal that that makes an annoying sound and doesn’t turn super well. The whole experience is broken and I can’t ride it.

Bootstrap vs Good Product

There’s a natural tension between bootstrapping product and working iteratively, and shipping perfect product. The key is that bootstrap is not about bad product. It is about breaking the scope into pieces, and shipping great intermediate versions while you learn. You ship great iterations.