Imagine how a hotel owner would react if they discovered no guests could book rooms online.
That’s what happened this past week for one of our clients.
The bug resulted from the client configuring room restrictions in a way that we didn’t anticipate, nor account for.
What should we do to fix this ASAP for our client?
You might think that we should:
Identify the issue
Work on a fix
Test it
Ship it to users
But once we identified the issue, I realized that there was another way.
Instead, we could tweak their room restrictions temporarily to fix the issue right away.
No code changes. No deploying. Minimal testing.
So that’s what we did.
I’ve been obsessed lately with the term “product engineer”:
Software engineers focus on building great software. Product engineers focus on building great products.
Don’t get me wrong. I love writing code. But I’ve realized that code is a means to an end. The code itself is not the product.
The product is what users experience.
It’s a trap to think you need code to solve a user’s problem.
In the case of the aforementioned bug, we didn’t need code (right away) to resolve the issue.
It’s this type of thinking that I believe makes for a great product engineer. It’s something I hope to do more of as I progress in my career.
I’ll leave you with this question to ponder:
Which problems are you encountering that might be solved in unconventional ways?