While product development success involves many interrelated factors, the concept of “People, Products, Money” (Hito-Mono-Kane) represents three crucial pillars.

I define these three elements as engineers and teams (People), the product itself (Products), and the economic resources supporting them (Money). I hope this can serve as a reference indicator for determining how each element interacts and decides the direction of product development, from technology selection to cost management, and the skills and scale of engineering teams.

※ I’m using the expression “Hito-Mono-Kane” (People, Products, Money) for clarity as keywords.

Definition of People, Products, Money

• People: Engineers, teams
• Products: Products (Features, Platforms, etc.)
• Money: Costs (System usage fees, infrastructure, SaaS fees, etc.)

Products: Product Development

In product development, I mainly want to understand the technical selection perspective.

• Engineers discuss this perspective daily in issues, pull requests, discussions, etc., and much of it is recorded in ADRs
• When creating ADRs, I'd like you to be conscious of including the People and Money perspectives

Money: Costs

I want to understand the cost perspective when selecting certain technologies.

Examples:

• When using AWS, should we create a new organization or coexist with an existing organization?
• Should we use SaaS or develop in-house?

People: Engineers

When making decisions about "Products and Money" above, I want to know the following perspectives.

• Who? Which team will work on it?
• Engineers who can handle it?
• Personas
• Who in the company?
• Number of people in the company
• Hiring difficulty
• Even a rough estimate would be helpful
• How much will engineering workload increase or decrease?
• Ideally, I'd like to know both short-term and long-term perspectives

Side Note: Emotion

I’m considering adding “Emotion” to product development and People, Products, Money, but since it might blur what I want to convey, I’ll write another article when I’ve organized my thoughts.

That’s all from the Gemba, where I want to spread the concept of product development and People, Products, Money.