The secret to better products? Let engineers drive vision
Summary
Halfway through my 5 1/2 years at SpaceX, management decided to change the way we developed software by handing over the job of creating a product vision to the engineering team. SpaceX has an extreme ownership culture where people are given more responsibility and expected to grow into that role instead of being given a little box to work in. When we started Sift, our small team sublet space from a company in our network who we knew could benefit from the product we were trying to develop. At the end of that period we had developed a product they were willing to pay for and one that is now helping a number of other startups solve similar problems. While this all sounds like a ‘nice to have’, I believe in a world where increasingly software is going to be written by low code applications and AI copilots, engineers need to level up.