Why company decides to build a product?
First of all, a little background. Team decides whether they can buy or integrate a product from existing vendor. Building is typically the last choice. Product manager or VP of product or whoever is taking care of responsibilities for product in a company, gets budget and product approval from his peers. In order to get budget approved, he has to gather requirements from customers and identify scope of product. They go through presentations with marketing, engineering and other heads.
Why does a company decides to hire engineers to build product?
Let’s say, all of above items are confirmed and company decides to build the product. Product gathers requirements from customers. Then it comes to designers to create a design for it. A roadmap of requirements is created for at least 6 months or more for the product such as in case of software couple of screens of the product. If the requirements are at least 6 months or more then engineers are hired. Remember, company will be burning at least 10K a month per engineer and they cannot hire an engineer, just to let go in 6 months since there are other hiring costs involved. If the engineer has broader applications in the company, then they can hire him full-time or contract if not. Engineers go through interviews and gets hired.
For example: if we’re building a basic chatting platform like What’s App. Product manager works with UI UX Designers to gather images and screens and define roadmap of requirements for website and Android & iOS mobile apps. Let’s say we decided to work with Fullstack engineers using React JS to build the website(assuming you find the engineers). They can also build backend of the website and frontend. Also, React engineers can somewhat build mobile applications (until they get too deep in the features and get stuck then have to use native engineers on iOS and Android). The Fullstack engineers build backend services which are required by website and mobile apps (typically they are the same services unless they have a different feature requirements). Meanwhile, Android and iOS engineer are hired and assigned tasks for the development. Also, we’ll need test engineers as soon as we start releasing services, website and applications. Product manager works with marketing team to market product. His target is usually acquiring new users. Let’s say, company has need for testing the various features during development but some of the scenarios they are not able to reproduce because lack of data which is happening on production then team need to work with data engineers to create the data in production environments. Also, team needs to release the product rapidly and needs to set up various checks on codebase then team will need to work with DevOPs engineer to set up pipelines for collaboration between engineers and rapid releases of features. Product manager also prepares presentations for product features for every sprint to demo other stakeholders.