One of my favourite books is Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. Obviously, it is not a software book, but there is a tiny story in it that explains product work better than most product blogs. A boy is told to walk through a magnificent palace carrying a spoon with few drops of oil. First time, he stares at the art and architecture, returns dazzled, and the spoon is empty. Second time, he watches only the spoon, brings the oil back safely, and cannot describe a single thing he saw. The “secret of happiness,” he is told, is to see the beauty of the palace without losing the oil.

In product and engineering, the palace is vision and value proposition to the user, the story you are trying to change in the world. The oil is technical operations,uptime, migrations, tech debt, security or SLAs. Early in my career, my bosses swung between those extremes. Sometimes they stared only at the palace, chasing big ideas and elegant architectures while spilling oil in the form of missed deadlines and shipping unstable systems. Other times, they have stared only at the spoon, living in tickets and incident queues. The systems were safe, but the product was not what users want.

The right walk is somewhere in between. On my path, becoming a Technical Product Lead, it is to making sure everyone in my team is able to internalize the product vision while shipping product that users love. Talking to users and carrying about the product narrative, while keeping a brief model of cost, technical complexity, and operational impact. Building with care, but having a solid overview in mind. Protecting the quality of what we build and craft, but never let that protectionism turn into blindness or perfectionism prevent shipping. Every product, like every palace, is a temporary structure. What endures isn’t perfection, it is awareness, the ability to see both the spoon and the world at once.