What Solutions Engineering is and how it drives product innovation
You might have heard the Solution Engineer (SE) term in some meetings but wonder what this job is about. Well, Solution Engineers usually are software engineers with some add-ons! You can find them in many large tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and … . At first, let’s distinguish two types of SEs. The first type is Sales Solution Engineering and the other one is Product Solution Engineering. Both of these engineers are talking to customers directly and trying to understand customers’ problems. The Sales Engineers are in a meeting to demo a product and show what’s possible with their current solutions and sometimes even provide custom solutions for a particular group of customers. It is common to see them in companies with B2B products especially if the product needs heavy customization for each client’s needs. In contrast, Product Solution Engineers are attending a meeting not to facilitate closing a particular sales deal but to gain knowledge about customers’ behaviors and problems and why those problems exist and then bring the knowledge to the Product Engineering Team and together with the rest of the team create solutions to enhance the product if the problem is valid and important.
In this article, I am talking about Product Solution Engineers and explain why we at Plista, created a Solution Engineering chapter in our Product and Engineering organization as a part of our plan in creating a product and innovation culture.
Why companies hire Product Solution Engineers
Product Managers, Designers, and Developers are working together to provide solutions to solve users’ problems. But usually, the success of the product team is highly dependent on two main factors:
1- Could they identify the right and crucial problems?
2- How effective those solutions were in solving the problem?
The problems usually get discovered by user complaints or UX researches and interviews or data analysis. Usually, at this phase, only Product Managers and Designers are involved. (Sadly in some companies, they are not even involved at this stage and a business department is identifying the problem and then report what customers want or a solution of their own as a feature request). You might notice one key element is missing in this game. The engineers, who build the product. The engineers usually know how the product has been built and they can suggest all the possible solutions to address a business problem. You might hear solutions from them that nobody even thought these are possible options or you just simply skip it because you have a different estimation about the difficulties of the development.
Now you may think the Product Manager can relay the customers’ problems to the tech team, but that’s not always true. Product Managers know the products very well but they might not have the deep technical knowledge and sometimes they might not know all the possible solutions for a problem. Although a Product Manager most of the time tries to sync the knowledge and problems to the engineering team, in reality, they can’t do it right all the time. They have their judgments and even if they could judge properly, why should we make the Product Manager a single point of failure in our communication with users and customers? Product Solution Engineers are not replacing the Product Managers but they are helping PMs to evaluate the importance and value of the problems easier and also make them familiar with some possible solutions. The same concept is true for a Product Designer. They also join the calls to understand clients’ pain points or users’ behavior but each of these 3 persons will bring different perspectives to the table. They can ask the right questions and reduce misunderstandings and biases. They can ensure the team doesn’t build the solutions each customer orders but the solutions which can solve the problems at scale.
If we want to have an autonomous and innovative product team that builds wonderful products to solve real problems, then we need designers and engineers to hear first-hand from the customers or users. They should not understand the problem just by reading a stakeholder ticket or product owner’s user story in Jira. Of course, engineers need focus, and also not every software engineer is comfortable attending regular calls with customers. That’s why Solution Engineers can bring context and focus to the team.
Responsibilities of a Solution Engineer
We talked about customer communication as one of the core responsibilities of an SE. But is it limited to product technical communications only? Of course not. Product Solution Engineers should be innovation drivers in the product team. To do that, they have some other responsibilities as well.
- SEs like any other software engineer, write high-quality scalable and maintainable codes and ship them to production servers. However, their job is not done by release a solution. They have to test and validate the effectiveness of their solution by analyzing the data and interviewing the users. They help the Product Team to reiterate the solution development to increase the possibility of achieving the expected outcome. Especially at Product Discovery Sprints which the team has a limited time to iterate fast on solutions, SEs knowledge about context and problems can help the team to make less time-consuming mistakes. As a rule of thumb, Product Managers ensure at least one Solution Engineer exists in a Product Discovery Sprints about a customer-facing feature.
- Partnership with stakeholders is another important responsibility of a Solution Engineer. They should be able to identify the right internal and external stakeholders in every area of focus and build a close relationship with them. These partnerships are especially very useful to form task forces for problem finding and solution exploration on a specific topic. Although SEs are helping a company to enhance the products and solutions, they should make sure the stakeholders understand that they are not there to come up with a solution for every problem of a customer.
- Influence decision-making beyond the product team. Not every problem can be solved by a product team independently. Sometimes there is a need for a company or product organization’s higher-level managers to decide about investing in a solution or changing the Product Strategy. For example, if SEs realize there is a huge demand for a significant group of users to use our product as a mobile app but the company doesn’t have a product team or a focus for mobile apps, then the problem might be beyond a scope of the current Web Product Team. In this case, SEs can team up with Business Heads and the Head of Products to influence VP level or C-level managers like CFO, CTO, and CPO to make them understand why the company needs to invest in a mobile app product.
- As SEs have in-depth knowledge about different customers, challenges and possible solutions, they can become an ambassador of the Product and Engineering teams and influence the industry by publishing articles and blogs or presenting insights and demoing solutions and products in conferences and events. Attending conferences also provides an opportunity for them to stay up to date with the latest and upcoming trends and learn about other available solutions in the market.
Different companies hire solution engineers for different purposes. Therefore the job descriptions and responsibilities of SEs can be different from company to company but as I mentioned before, generally solution engineers are software engineers with good soft skills that help them to communicate, understand and direct the companies to build customer-friendly solutions.
