Wearing Two Hats: SRE and Product

In mid 2020 I became a Product Owner at Okta, and earlier this year a Product Architect. I’ve been doing both while still managing SRE teams, so I decide what we should build and then my teams run it afterwards.

Some things I’ve learned from doing both jobs at once:

Internal tooling is a product. The users are engineers, but they’re still users. If a tool is hard to use, people find a way around it, and you end up supporting the workaround as well as the tool.

Write down the problem before the solution. Ops people, me included, tend to go straight to how we’ll build something. The product side makes me write down who it’s for and why it matters first. It slows things down at the start and saves time later.

A roadmap is useful for saying no. When someone asks for something that isn’t on it, you have an agreed, written-down reason for not doing it yet, which makes the conversation a lot easier.

Being on call changes your product decisions. Knowing my own teams will be supporting whatever we ship makes me much more careful about what goes on the roadmap.

It’s a lot of extra work, but if you’re an SRE or ops lead and you get offered product responsibilities, I’d recommend taking them. It’s made me a better manager, and my tickets have got a lot clearer.