Own Your Best Self

I often see myself as a product-oriented engineer. Maybe it's because I’ve always written code with an end goal in mind. I tend to look beyond the immediate task or technical detail, and I’m comfortable navigating between requirements, functionality, and usability.

This mindset hasn’t always been a perfect fit. In some teams, when the need was for someone to execute tasks systematically, my tendency to question the "why" behind everything wasn’t especially welcome. Other times, I’ve prioritized shipping a usable product over perfecting the implementation, possibly falling short in technical depth.

Still, I feel that my approach to engineering has generally been well-received, and that tells me something important: it’s better to embrace your strengths than to fight against them in search of a different version of yourself. That’s not an excuse to ignore your weaknesses, but the best strategy is often to recognize what you’re good at and amplify it.

Good leadership should balance teams based on individuals’ strengths. That’s what I like to believe. Yet I notice a common impulse to create interchangeable team members — where A, B, or C can handle any task, no matter what. That sounds efficient in theory, but in practice it rarely works. Not everyone can or should be product-oriented. Task-focused and technically-minded engineers are just as vital.

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