Comment by juancn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by juancn | Hacker News Reader

The best products I've worked for took input (mainly) from three sources:

- Product Managers: a.k.a. the voice of the customer, what customer want and need

- Engineering: what's possible, rethinking the product from the tech POV, to create delightful experiences.

- Executives: Vision about what the company should be in the long term

All these crossed by a strong design team, to make sure we've a coherent UI, internationalization teams, accessibility, documentation, support, etc.

When all these align, it's a magical experience where you feel you're making something useful. Your product not just does what is requested, but it solves problems for customers they didn't know they had in the first place, because they had no way of framing it, competitors start playing catch-up, and you end up in the lead defining a market.

Typically you also end up having magnific engineering challenges with solutions that will make you proud of having built them.

As usual, always think about what's valuable and why, and push for that.

This, frankly, is the real definition of a unicorn software company.

I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with a unicorn - a unicorn is on a fast growth trajectory, with a large and reasonably-likely upside. Not necessarily one that where PMs, execs, and eng can finish each others' sentences, they're so well attuned.

I thought they meant unicorn, as in the unicorn love partner who has all the great qualities and doesn't exist, rather than the VC unicorn, a quick-to-a-billion company.

I’ll admit that I didn’t make it clear the sarcasm/joke. But I was playing on the fact that a unicorn is a mythical creature, just as mythical as this functioning proddev team.

I agree. Also add customer support / customer success to that list of sources and marketing / SEO.

Really if you are working for the company in any capacity your inout should be taken into consulting.

However it is up to executives to have a strategy, which should also take into account all those sources.

I'm sure I'm not the only one in the audience interested in more details about how the specific team you may be talking about was organized to come together, operated, and evolved. Great to hear about the key role of designers being recognized.

It would take a book to go over it.

In the early stages is all about hiring. Getting the right people, minimal structure and let them do what they're best at with a few key leaders with a strong vision.

As you grow, you need to build the leadership structure, true believers that let the help people grow. That's the main part, leaders main concern should be people. You need a structure that trusts and empowers employees. If you did the hiring in the first phase right, some of those will rise to lead (maybe as proper managers or as tech leads, architects, lead designers, etc.)

Usually, at first you build structure for product and engineering, and maybe place a few UX/Designers as cross functional roles, with little structure, to help all teams build coherent UI.

Eventually they grow into their own org and are involved in product driven features in the early stages. Doing mocks, running usability labs, etc.

With other functions, such as accessibility and i18n (even security) the same happens, as the org can accommodate them these structures start gaining size and their own internal structure.

As the team grows into the hundreds process appears, but is should always be more of a helper than a straightjacket.

> All these crossed by a strong design team, to make sure we've a coherent UI, internationalization teams, accessibility, documentation, support, etc.

Did you mean to pull all that under "design"? I've never seen a design org that wrote technical documentation or provided support for instance.

No, I meant design team, i18n team, doc team, support team, security team, etc. Each with their respective roles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com