Issue link: https://read.uberflip.com/i/1479515
To make that decision, you've got to know your tools. You, and your technical counterparts, have an obligation to know what's out there. If you make the decision to build from scratch based only on your conviction that what you are building will (eventually) provide a competitive moat for your product, you risk building something that is 75, 80, or even 95% already available. And that's a problem because it might very well turn out that your target customer is well-served by a 75% solution. While you are building from scratch, a competitor comes along and releases the 75% solution based on the off the shelf AI. When yours is released, it's better, but no one cares because the 20% additional functionality isn't tempting enough to your customers to support the switching cost. The answer to this conundrum almost always lies in the third way: experiment and gain customers with the off-the-shelf, and in parallel build the truly innovative system. In fact, what you learn by experimenting and talking to customers with your first version (or two, or three or more) can feed into the development of your from-scratch offering, shaping it into something that might be unexpectedly brilliant. So, back to our power couple — a product leader and their technical counterpart — this is where we get to talk about trust. "Product and Engineering should have an equal footing, trust in each other, and be willing to make trade off decisions based on long and short term impact to the business." (Martin Fowler) If we can't divide the world into neat, separate areas, the what and the why on one side of the border, and the how on the other, that means we're truly in it together. I trust you to help me know the tool set and put lightweight things in front of real customers, you trust me to pull the trigger when it's go-time on innovative new software. Likewise, I trust you to keep our systems agile and easy to change, to make software that evolves, and you trust me to give you time and resources to do that. Together, we succeed. AMAZON WEB SERVICES | COUNSELING FOR POWER COUPLES If you have questions or just want to talk to an expert, contact AWS sales at aws.amazon.com/contact-us