Here's how you can enhance productivity in product engineering using automation and technology.

Every team whether its operations, development or admins. They are useful for everyone, however it’s expected from DevOps team to do that.

Automation Tools are like ball bearings in wheels. They keep everything moving, and when done well drift into to the background while the teams energy is focused delivering features and improvements. Additionally there is some intangible improvements like reduced decision fatigue and development QOL. Most developers want to code and are annoyed and or exhausted from these types of issues and a select few that a fixers that take pride in this kind of tooling, and that’s why the SDET, DevOps, SRE disciplines exist, they see a little bit bigger of the picture than most.

Avoiding recurrent manual processes helps to prevent manual errors without a doubt. Automating processes to avoid this will always be the best alternative both for preventing errors and for improving the lifecycle of all development.

Not only CI/CD, in my experience, automation tools like Ansible, or automatic environment set-up using tools such as Terraform help to automate daily business.

Harnessing the power of automation and technology is the need of an hour. Identify repetitive tasks that can be automated. Look for tools that can streamline processes like code generation, testing, and deployment. Integrate continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines to automate the build and release process. Leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to analyze data and identify areas for optimization and improvement.

GenAI is, at the moment, one of the top most innovation trends, as it has several applications for human interfacing, which is the niche where meaningless human work is less prone to be replaced by a machine, and thus free talent and creativity for more worthy activities.

To improve the workflow of any process, it's necessary to have an agile methodology that allows for time optimization, flexibility, and better adaptability. Without this, a project can hardly be fluid and will always encounter problems along the way.

Individual developers should also look into their own personal workflows. For example in the Linux world, there exists countless opportunities to optimize the menial stuff out in your terminal workflows, whether it is a simple alias for a long but commonly used command, or maybe a fuzzy finder so you do not have to remember everything, just get close enough and accept the correct suggestion.

Collaborative platforms are vital for boosting productivity in dispersed product engineering teams. They facilitate real-time communication and document sharing, ensuring alignment. Version control systems like Git streamline code management, averting conflicts and redundant work. By centralizing resources, these platforms eliminate email clutter and disorganized file systems. Additionally, they foster innovation by encouraging open communication and idea exchange, enhancing team cohesion. Embracing such tools fosters efficiency, teamwork, and innovation, driving overall productivity in product engineering.

The future of documentation and knowledge management is semantic storage, GenAI-exploited, instead of static pages and search engines.

Totally agree, knowledge sharing is the best practice that can be applied in any work team. Feedback, contribution, and support help to minimize effort, time, and rework, ensuring that added value can be achieved in most cases, without neglecting the complete record of this.