Working in startups means you wear many hats, sometimes on the same day. The majority of the work will be technical engineering contributions to move the product. This tends to be your primary work function and what you were hired for.
A big component of making these contributions is communication. It does not matter how brilliant your idea or implementation is if you cannot communicate it to team members or customers. It will be like it does not even exist. Communication must not only include how and why you are doing something. It must include how and why you know it is high value work.
This is where a framework such as Objectives and Key Results can be useful by giving you a framework to follow. The absolute most important thing is that there is a measurable metric. Ideally, this metric remains measurable through the life cycle of the feature to give you a basis for whether or not your feature is working as intended.
If you are lucky enough to have paying customers, you will likely spend some time on how the feature will be used by the customer. This can be an interesting experience because the customer will always use the product in ways you never imagined. This can be an exciting and stressful time; however, the amount of ownership you receive over this phase gives a large sense of pride and success.
The product manager, engineer, and designer roles are becoming supercharged by AI. You no longer need to be an expert at all three because you can be guided to multiple solutions. Maybe it is iterating on a technical architecture because the feature does not run fast enough. Maybe it is using a Scheduled Automation where the AI tool checks your Linear board and provides weekly updates or burndowns. Maybe it is the AI generating you three or four different interfaces and demoing them so you can use your expert taste to determine the best.
Collapsing these roles is allowing teams to move faster and ship higher quality products. The other amazing thing these days is that all features can ship with extensive documentation because anything typed is essentially free.
We are moving towards a world where a single person can be highly successful being responsible for an entire feature. This no longer requires the Midas Touch.
Happy building.
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