Comments by "Brent Jacobs" (@br3nto) on "Software Developers "AREN'T Data Driven"?!" video.

  1. 5:47 this is where I strongly disagree with the direction the software development industry is going. Product Management should be a specialisation of software engineering. The reason of simple: people who complete software engineering degrees are specifically taught how to gather and validate requirements and how to build systems based on those requirements. People who aren’t Software Engineer degree qualified just haven’t been taught the correct skills for effective product development. I find that people with the Product Management title are often under skilled and prioritise the wrong thing so they make many bad decisions because they don’t have good development and system design foundations to guide them. Likewise, Product management is often conflated with people management. The absolute worst part about the separation of Product Management from software development is when requirements development precedes software development; we return to a waterfall based model and loose our agile processes. We increase the time it takes to get feedback that validates whether the requirements were correct or not or whether tweaks are needed or not. Product Managers should think of themselves as forward scouts that gather information about the lay of the land and bring it back to the tribe for deliberation. As a team we can form hypotheses that act as our requirements, then we work quickly to build solutions that either validate or invalidate those hypotheses.
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