At HappyScribe, engineers are Product Engineers, not just engineers. This means that, aside 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 necessary iterations in the middle and user feedback.

Here are some product principles to always keep in mind:

Deep Work & Flow

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

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

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% makes the overall value 0%. A 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 a product and working iteratively, and shipping a perfect product. The key is that Bootstrap is not about a bad product. It is about breaking the scope into pieces and shipping great intermediate versions while you learn. You ship great iterations.