The usual story says service companies are where you start and product companies are where you arrive. Having worked both sides, that ranking never made sense to me.
Service work buys you breadth; product work buys you depth and accountability. The full article walks through both tradeoffs — the shallow ownership that comes with shipping a feature and moving on, the narrower exposure that comes with years in one codebase — and makes the case that the choice is about timing rather than tiers.
Read the full article on Medium.
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