Stuff Software Engineers should know about product management!

Success will most likely come your way if you have a great Product Manager in the team. However, not all teams are that lucky. In some team setups, senior tech leads or architects also double up as product managers. Even otherwise, it is good to know some product management to take sound decisions in your architecture, code, deployment and metrics.

Here are some tips to build a great product when software engineers manage the product:

1. Know your customers and their problems.

Who is the end user? Meet and talk to them even if they are sitting in a warehouse!

Ask if you should include feature X before they can use it? Is this an incremental value addition or a game changer? This will get you to MVP quickly.

2. What is your delivery channel?
 Mobile, web or multichannel presence. Do your research and pick one to start with.

3. List and estimate non-functional requirements

How many concurrent users? Acceptable latency? Downtime? You get the gist.

4. Release fast and release often

Take customer feedback and iterate. Building the most awesome product takes time. And time is often a luxury. 

Releasing product often keeps you on track. Intensity and quality of the feedback helps you prioritize the next set of features to code. Feature prioritization is the key. It also ensure that the team is productive.

If your customers say "I want to use it today", you are on track. Make the feature available to them in pre-production.

Such interaction also saves you from big software  re-architectures and re-implementation.

Caution: Ensure that your customers spend serious time interacting with your software.

5. Measure your success (or failure!)

In helps you analyze what's working and what's not. Get rid of later and reinforce the former. Set goals and strive towards it.

If you can measure metrics like conversion, sales, traffic, API calls etc in real time, nothing like it!

6. Experiment
Fear not! Capture those new ideas from the team.Let the numbers and your intuition find its way to newer and successful experiments.

That one new feature can be the game changer!

7. Provide good customer service!

Monitor your application and support it. FAQs, Documentation, Tickets, Training etc are some options to chose from.

And may you become a great product manager!

Software stack deployment automation the Amazon CloudFormation way!

Deploying a complete software stack is breeze with Amazon's CloudFormation. It provides a repeatable and predictable mechanism to launch a stack comprising of EC2 instances, load balancers, databases and other Amazon resources.

There are many sample CloudFormation (CF) recipes to get you started, LAMP recipe being the simplest one. Once the hardware is setup, you can use CloudFormation to bootstrap applications. This is where is gets a little tricky.

Multiple options are available including CloudInit. You can pass executable actions to instances at launch time through EC2 user-data attribute. Other options are Chef and Puppet.

Some scenarios where CloudFormation can be of great help:

1. You own a simple web application running on Tomcat and fronted by a load balancer. New engineers joining your team can simply run the CF template to create their own developer environment on the cloud.
2. You own an application that builds on multi-instance architectures. Multi-instance architectures separate software instances (or hardware systems) operate on behalf of different client organizations. Launching a new stack for a new client becomes just too simple!
3. Continuous delivery is simplified via use of CF. Launch a new stack for QA for Feature 1. However, Feature 2 will have to wait deployment till QA has certified Feature 1. Launch a new stack for Feature 2 and build parallel continuous delivery pipelines.

Do remember to delete the stack once it is not needed!