Don't go chasing waterfalls

It's stuck in your head now isn't it

This iconic trio and their global hit "Waterfalls" has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm about to blog other than they both contain the word "waterfall". But easily one of the best tracks to come from the 90s, and I will always think of it whenever I hear the word waterfall or see one.

This week we're talking Product Life Cycle and Product Management. Things that I definitely nerd out on coming from my event planning background and my affinity for entrepreneurship.

We were prompted to reflect on today's lecture and share if the lesson has allowed us to empathize with the goals of our respective host company and its founders, and if we have a better understanding of where we fit in the larger picture.

Code/+/Trust is only a few years old. It is the brainchild of several leaders in the local tech industry, created to meet the increasingly high demand for new and existing software with a fully in-house, onshore, development team. We work with clients to produce fully custom software, DevOps, product planning, project takeovers, UX/UI, and testing. The customer base is diverse and the market is broad, capturing everything from startups to Fortune 500.

I have a sincere appreciation for the mission of our company, and I'm excited to be involved while they've still got that new car smell. The founders saw the opportunity to help other companies find their Product Market Fit and deliver solutions with the Code/+/Trust team's expert marketing and development skill. It's cool that we get to work on such a wide range of products, at all different stages of the Product Life Cycle. My ADHD brain loves this. Always something new to learn and seeing a lot of inspiring innovation.

I'm still figuring so much of this new way of life called software development and how I generally fit into the tech world. But I do think today's lecture helped me at least paint a clearer picture of how I fit into Code/+/Trust's world. I will be working with the team entrusted to turn designs into tangible, functional products that meet the market's need as defined by the project's visionaries. I will be helping project managers, product owners, and product managers by speaking into the feasibility of a project's strategy, plan, and development milestones. Which is awesome!

Right now we are still in training, but they have created an environment that mimics that of a client project's. We have been tasked with building a web app that the development team has already built and that is already running. We have only been given the basic resources like a style sheet and the tech stack to make it happen. We are using a new stack, so it's not like we can just look at the exisiting product to copy/paste the code, but we can reference it if we get stuck. Because we aren't truly building something from the ground up, we know what the final product is, and we have fixed parameters, this training project does seem to follow more of a Waterfall flow.

That said, we aren't operating in a vacuum. The team invites us to the standups, demos, and project meetings where we get to see and experience the Agile method. So we're kind of getting the best of both worlds.

Today's lecture and the week's topic just make me more grateful for and excited about the opportunity to be a part of the Code/+/Trust team. Although it still feels pretty surreal! I'm definitely looking forward to the day they turn me loose on the real deal projects, but this lesson and our training will make that transition so much smoother.