Self-study|IT|Pre-Int|Final quiz

Throughout my career, I’ve been involved in writing mobile apps. I’m what some people call a product engineer since the engineering that I do is directly related to the product that people use.

On the contrary, some engineers are not product engineers. They work to provide services for other software engineers or make improvements to websites and apps so that they run faster.

I’ll describe a product process for you so you can understand more about my responsibilities.

We have a product manager or PM who decides what we’ll work on. We also have designers, who figure out how the app will look. You know, UI and UX and all that stuff. And finally, it’s my team’s turn. So, the PM sets the task, the designers create mock-ups and give them to us, and we implement and ship all the feature for users. The whole process is collaborative, we all provide our own expertise and make a lot of decisions together.

It takes about 20 percent of my time. I want to highlight that this process is really fast. It’s not uncommon for us to conceive an idea and get it out within a week or two. Because there are several people involved in this process, to keep everyone in the loop we have frequent meetings in order to communicate what we’re all working on. OK! So, 20% of my time is spent working with PM’s, designers, and other engineers to discuss what we’re working on.

Next, 70% of my time is spent building stuff.

So, based on the discussions we’ve had with the product manager and designer, it’s up to me and the other engineers to build the thing. My process usually starts with figuring out a plan for how to build the app. Then, I go and code according to my plan. Sometimes it goes according to plan and sometimes it doesn’t. But it certainly helps to have a plan so that it saves time and frustration. In addition to building features, I will be fixing bugs in the meantime or making improvements to our tests and tooling to make development easier.

So, this whole portion of reading, writing and fixing code takes quite a bit of time because of all the little problems I’m solving along the way, and so usually a large portion of my day is spent doing this. The last 10% of my day is spent doing miscellaneous things: having one-on-ones with my manager and other people to talk about career stuff, participating in meetings in other parts of the company to find out what everyone is working on, and just working and participating in any other areas that I’m passionate about at work.

Okay. So, if my math is correct, that comes out to a hundred percent. 20% collaborating with cross-functional roles, 70% building and coding, and 10% miscellaneous things around the company. Not every day looks the same on the job.

There are some days where I have meetings all day and I code only for an hour or so. And there are other days when I have no meetings, and I code for the whole day. The variety of my days helped me to maintain a good balance.