Stop Coding: You Have a Product Gap | Sam Selikoff | EmberCamp Chicago 2018

all right awesome to be here um I'm really excited to be talking to you about one of my favorite topics which is uh product so the name of this talk is stop coding you have a product Gap my name is Sam selikoff if you don't know me and you can find me on Twitter at Sam selikoff and uh I've run a company called embermap embermap.com we make videos and podcasts and other stuff for member developers so check it out if you haven't heard of it before so

why did I come to a room full of coders and why am I giving a talk called stop coding well as Engineers we love coding right when if you think about when we first started coding it was so empowering we had a problem we learned HTML we learned CSS and we have a solution right we have some idea for something we want to build and we learn these Technologies fire up

our editors and there you go next we learn JavaScript we start looking for things on stack overflow and at the beginning of our careers this is really kind of the pattern that we learn eventually we learn high level things like bootstrap or even Ember but basically we are kind of reinforced over and over again that coding is the way to solve our problems

but there comes a point in everyone's career when you kind of encounter some new problems so who here can relate to this I've been in meetings at work all day I have to code at night because that's the only time I get any real work done or this I've got three different top priorities right now people come to me because I get stuff done but sometimes I have to stay late because I have so much on my plate or about this

my team is understaffed we have too much work to do and we're not moving fast enough we try coding at night we try more coding for more managers and we try more coding on more projects because code is what we know as a way to solve our problems that's how we've gotten stuff done in the past and so basically every new set of problems we continue to try to use this method foreign if only we could become super coders

we could get all of our work done we would need to expand our team and all of our managers would be happy so what if I told you that that's a myth what if I told you that these symptoms these pain points are not caused by a lack of engineering resources and that no amount of technical skills could solve these problems What If instead I said that the root cause of all these problems is a product app and until you address your product

issues you're never going to get rid of these symptoms so what is a product app well to answer this we first need to answer the question what is product and for the purpose of this talk I'm going to break product down into two aspects one is the product decisions that we make so the actual product the thing that we're building and shipping

and the other is the product process so the process by which we make those decisions and to understand a product Gap we first need to know what makes for great product decisions and what a great product process looks like so let's start by talking about product decisions when we think of an actual product we usually think of things like the hardware and software specifications we think of maybe the functionality of a web app