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Discussion on: If you work as a dev for a product team, what's it like?

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Ryan Kahn (he/him)

I've worked at / with a few product companies, here's my take on a couple of points you made:

it can sometimes be a struggle between development and product managers, trying to find the balance between doing something carefully/properly and shipping something by X date

I've experienced less of this friction when developers have a part in setting the product goals and scope. That way the product manager can accurately communicate realistic timelines for work. Looking back on teams where this was a problem I would say it was usually a case of "If we had communicated on this scope earlier we would have come up with a different timeline."

Our dev process is also quite loose ... I like how simple it is but I don't think it works perfectly either. Does anything work perfectly??

I think perfection in a process is the ability to evolve it over time. To that end the most important meeting in my mind is a retrospective meeting. This is where you honestly look at your process to see where it might improve, and track those improvements.

Dev team is split by platform

I have worked in small organizations like this, but dividing teams this way as a default makes you default to working across teams to accomplish big product initiatives (since it will involve work across the server / client / infrastructure / ect). I think for that reason all the teams I've worked on at larger product organizations have been cross-functional, and organized around some cross-cutting but coherent concern. Like "The Presence Team" who works on all aspects of presence within the product. That way you can accomplish big initiatives around that idea, and work across teams in a way that aligns more with how the product works.