Engineering And Product Collaboration

Learn how amazing software products are made through cross-functional collaboration.

What you'll learn

Understand the composition, purpose and roles within cross-functional teams in modern technology companies.

Be able to collaboratively plan, build, release and iterate on software by harnessing the natural tension between product and engineering.

Gain insight into how to balance short-term and long-term needs, such as being early to market versus managing risk and technical debt.

Learn the mechanisms to incorporate a culture of transparency, sharing and feedback within a team.

Requirements

There's no formal experience needed. However, some idea or experience of what it's like to be a software engineer or product manager in industry is a bonus.

Description
Have you ever wondered how to make your team more effective, efficient and fun? Look no further. Let's ship!Learn how software companies create world-leading products through collaboration, and then take those techniques away and apply them to your own work and team.Here's what we'll cover:We'll learn how collaboration between product and engineering creates amazing software. How exactly are teams structured in order to create the software that we use today? We'll see how there is no lone genius doing all of the work. Instead, it's collaboration between a multitude of people. We'll be focussing specifically on product management and software engineering.We'll discover how cross-functional teams are composed, and what everyone's roles and responsibilities are. We'll look inside and outside of the team and see who does what and when. We'll also see how a natural tension between everyone on the team can lead to better results.We'll look at the process of planning, prioritising, building, shipping and iterating. At each of these stages, we'll learn the key things to do in order to make sure your team is staying lean and focussing on what matters.Next, we'll dig deep into common software engineering frustrations. Technical debt, proposing technical projects, and feature factories: we've got them covered! We'll think about solutions for tackling each of these.Then, we'll explore common product management frustrations. Why are the developers so slow? Why are big bang launches a bad idea? We'll explore deeper.We'll explore routines for healthy and productive teams. This covers everything from stand-ups to milestone planning to retrospectives. We'll provide you the toolkit to sharpen up your team.If you're a complete beginner, or haven't got your first job in industry yet, then that's no problem. Learning about the ways in which we think about planning, prioritising and building software will help you out in your studies and make sure you're on the front foot for the future.
Overview

Section 1: Welcome

Lecture 1 Welcome to the course!

Lecture 2 Collaboration creates amazing software

Lecture 3 An important principle

Lecture 4 Exercise: your strengths and weaknesses

Section 2: The composition of a cross-functional team

Lecture 5 The cross-functional team

Lecture 6 Outside of the team

Lecture 7 Trifectas and tension

Lecture 8 Different genre, different orchestra

Section 3: A simple matter of shipping software

Lecture 9 Backlogs, roadmaps and north stars

Lecture 10 Feedback loops and agile

Lecture 11 Prioritisation

Lecture 12 From nothing to something: generating ideas

Lecture 13 Prototyping and experimentation

Lecture 14 Building and shipping

Lecture 15 Measuring and observation

Lecture 16 Exercise: audit your team’s processes

Section 4: Common Engineering frustrations and how to tackle them

Lecture 17 Introduction to engineering frustrations

Lecture 18 Technical debt

Lecture 19 Getting buy-in for technical projects

Lecture 20 Feature factories

Lecture 21 Exercise: Diving deeper into feature factories

Section 5: Common Product frustrations and how to tackle them

Lecture 22 Engineering is too slow!

Lecture 23 Big bang launches

Lecture 24 Exercise: reverse engineer a product launch

Section 6: Routines for healthy teams

Lecture 25 Stand-ups

Lecture 26 Backlog grooming and estimation

Lecture 27 Milestones

Lecture 28 Retrospectives and implementing feedback

Lecture 29 Go and implement these techniques with your team!

Section 7: Conclusion

Lecture 30 Additional resources

Lecture 31 Thank you!

New to mid-level product managers, software engineers and engineering managers/team leads. Additionally, anyone aspiring to work in technology will learn a lot about how we all get things done.