The Software Engineer's Guidebook

CHAPTER 5

THRIVING IN DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTS

Each company is different in culture, values, pace of work, and more. This means there’s no single way to be successful in all environments. However, there are enough similarities among types of companies like Big Tech or high-growth startups for some common approaches to work. In this chapter, we cover:

1. Product teams and product-minded engineers
2. Platform teams
3. “Peacetime” versus “wartime”
4. Types of companies

1. PRODUCT TEAMS AND PRODUCT-MINDED ENGINEERS

Product teams are engineering teams that build a product for external customers. They are noticeably different from platform teams which serve internal customers, and service teams which don’t work on their own products but provide ...