Breaking Silos: Why Software Engineers Benefit from Departmental Dalliances
As software engineers, domain knowledge is a crucial aspect behind being able to deliver business value to the organisation. Unlocking business value, continually, is one of the best ways to grow as an Engineer, get promoted and serve your team.
Having a solid base of domain knowledge will help when debugging code, mentoring other software engineers, prioritising work, build vs buy decisions, quick solution or more longer term planning and nearly everything you do in your day to day work.
What I have come to expect from a strong, high performing team is the ability to question until understanding. So when we are working with our product manager to understand what should be prioritised, a high performing team, will want to fill in their gaps of understanding by questioning why this is needed, and if this is the best approach to solve the problem.
We should not settle to engineer solutions that we are not in complete understanding of why we are doing this and how it moves the needle.
Typically, I have experienced software engineers building domain knowledge in 3 ways:
Tenure.
Code exploration.
Product.