What are some mechanical engineering software necessary or useful to be proficient in?

What are some practices in Software Engineering which are useful in other fields of product development as well?

• As Jeff Hammerbacher once remarked the smartest of our age are working on how to get people to click on ads. I feel a few dozen people rolling out a service as awesome as Instagram leaves a lot for people in other industries to learn from. No doubt it is cheaper and easier to develop software products but there is no arguing it is a lot agile and smarter than product design in any other field.

• Answer:

  Some of the following principles started in the software industry, others have existed for much longer. Release early, release often. People spend a lot of time worrying about "what ifs": What if my application gets 10m users overnight and the servers crash? What if I ask her out and she says no? What if the press doesn't get excited about my demo? Unlike releasing a product, worrying and speculating are not effective ways to gather feedback. This is one of the major principles of the Lean Startup Approach. Besides, 99% of the time you will find that your worries were unnecessary (because it takes you years to get to 10m users, the girl says 'yes', and the press turns out to be less valuable to you than word-of-mouth referrals). Automate everything. Software engineers try to automate anything that has to be done repeatedly. Automation shortens the product development cycle while also reducing the risk of human errors and omissions. On a different note, products that automate tasks which people have to do manually are often very successful. A/B test everything. One finding from UI/UX design is that people's behaviors are far from predictable (try http://www.slideshare.net/webanalystsinfo/guess-the-outcome-of-15-ab-tests in full-screen mode just for fun). When you have several hypotheses, the only way to determine the best one is to test all of them side-by-side. Relying solely on intuition often leads people astray. Start with a Beta version. If you brand something as a Beta, customers are more forgiving of flaws and more generous with feedback. Be data-driven. Data should not be the only thing you consider when you make product decisions, but it should be a major factor. If you're not sure about something, gather data to help you decide. Simplicity trumps complexity. Many of the recent Silicon Valley success stories are products that did the same thing as the competition, but much more seamlessly and elegantly (iPod vs other mp3 players, Dropbox vs other cloud storage providers, etc.) When it comes to software, code that is simple and elegant stands up to time much better than code that is complex or 'clever'. Decouple as much as possible. When writing software, interdependencies kill you because keeping different pieces in sync creates a lot of work, and because bugs quickly creep in when you forget to update a dependency. As a result, good engineers design software so that various pieces communicate with each other through well-defined interfaces. That makes it much easier to improve the internals of something without worrying about breaking everything else. This is a good principle outside of software as well: turn components into black boxes as much as possible, so that you can iterate on each component separately. Be motivated by solving problems, not by making money. Ironically, writing software for the purpose of making money will usually make less money that writing software that solves problems that you or your friends have. This applies to other fields as well: if you focus on gimmicks or tricks or money, you won't be as successful as if you focus on making something that solves a problem or makes people's lives a little more pleasant. Don't be afraid to dream big. Software engineers and startups often pursue huge, audacious ideas (especially in Silicon Valley). Sometimes these ideas pan out and sometimes they don't, but thinking big when your competitors think small can be a great product strategy.