Good products and how to make them

We took the Galleri cancer screening test recently. A great and simple experience. Super easy to take – we went for the home phlebotomist option, which was easy to schedule, and the phlebotomist was a pro. Results came back quickly; we happily had all "no cancer signal" results. A much better experience than almost any other medical test we have had. The Galleri team has clearly thought a lot about how to make this test easy and understandable.

I love the multiview offering on PeacockTV for the Olympics. An easy way to jump into viewing, and easy to drill through to full screen for the event you care about. And now I see they have several multiviews on the home page, one for all sports, one just for team sports, etc. I've wanted this level of experience or better for college football for years. It is exactly what you want on a busy sports day.

It is not without quirks, but our Torqeedo electric motor has been awesome for letting us get out and quietly tour the shoreline and see the otters and seals without scaring them off. It can be quirky to operate, and it burns thru the last 25% of power fast, it can be suprising when the motor quits 100 yards from the dock. But it is still great and lets you experience the water in whisper-quiet fashion.

I am trying out Grammarly. I do like AI tools that are directly embedded in your normal workflow; I don't want to have to wander off to some tool and compose a prompt, my current work context IS my prompt. I want tools that process what I am doing and suggest improvements and new directions. Microsoft Copilot for instance is great, Grammarly seems promising.

All these products come from very different companies; I imagine their cultures are widely variant, reflecting their different industries, backgrounds, and locations. Great products can come from anywhere if people are focused, motivated, pulling on the oars together.

I am not sure I could definitively describe what cultures lead to great products – but I stumbled across a thread this week with some great guidance for young engineers from John Carmack – all about building "full product skills." The comments then led me to this article on The Product-Minded Engineer – engineers who think broadly about their product and their company, who communicate well, and who make product decisions deeply informed by business needs.

These points completely align with my experience. When I started at Microsoft in the late 80's, the company was full of people like this. Great engineers who understood the business and had great business ideas, product/program managers who could write code and discuss technical issues. There were no organizational boundaries when it came to running the business. As a result, engineering teams could run much leaner; they didn't need all the overhead of giant PM teams because the engineers themselves understood the business, understood customers, and understood the tradeoffs. And product and program managers could easily jump in and communicate well with engineers.

Microsoft management encouraged full product skills. The executive team had deep business and technical skills. And they mandated that engineering teams participate in product support calls, support customers in online forums, etc. Brad Silverberg was particularly encouraging in this way; he made sure that everyone understood exactly how our customers felt. Business and customer knowledge was pushed down to everyone so that everyone could think about the business and customers as they did their jobs.

Because when you are in the trenches doing your work, you are the CEO of the company at that moment. You are the sole representative of the company at the moment; no one else is around. As you make every little product decision, you need to understand fully the business and make the right business decision.

In my most recent job I ended up back in a large company that made decisions the old way – highly siloed organizations, engineers expected to "stick to their lane", large groups of PMs of all sorts trying to direct it all, attempts to invent processes to direct the work, ugh. It was inefficient, slow, and led to poorly informed decisions and, ultimately, bad products.

Great products come from all kinds of organizations and cultures, and I bet that all of these cultures encourage people to really understand the business and the customer.