What is a Product Engineer?

Not Just Coders

Picture this: engineers who don't just speak in code but in product design and customer problems.

Product engineers are a special breed of engineers that don't just see themselves as coders or developers but as builders who deeply care about the products they build.

They're driven by a professional pride and desire to build great products, going beyond the traditional developer role to become genuine drivers who put their names behind great products they played a key role in shaping and delivering.

The Counter to Hyperspecialisation

The tech industry has seen for a long time a trend towards hyperspecialisation, with engineering roles becoming increasingly narrow and technical.

We have frontend engineers, backend engineers, mobile engineers, DevOps engineers. We have developers defining their careers with a specific language: JavaScript engineers, Swift engineers, C# engineers, Python engineers. We even have developers that seemingly dedicate their entire careers to a single framework: React engineers, Rails engineers, Azure engineers.

Feels like it's only a matter of time until we see job postings seeking for-loop engineers and variable naming engineers.

Jokes aside, specialisation isn't totally without its merits as it has allowed engineers to build deep expertise in specific technologies, a key component in building quality software. However, it also lead to silos where collaboration and broader product understanding became a nice-to-have and often not even an expectation or focus for engineering roles.

Product engineers stand as a counter-movement to this trend. They embody a holistic approach to engineering, where understanding the entire product and context around it is just as important as the technical skills required to build it. This broad perspective enables them to bridge gaps between different technical domains and ensure that the product serves its customers effectively.

AI: The New Playground

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in software development is rapidly setting new expectations for engineers. With AI tools becoming more sophisticated and capable, engineers are now expected to leverage these tools to enhance their work, not just in terms of speed and efficiency but also in terms of broadening their area of responsibilities.

Engineers in a post-ChatGPT and Cursor world are now expected to work in more languages, leverage more tools and libraries, and simply deliver more, taking control of a broader range of technologies and disciplines in their daily work.

For product engineers, AI tools unlock a higher level of abstraction. With AI making more specialised tasks accessible, engineers can focus their work on creative problem-solving, ideation, and exploring new ways to meet customer needs.

This new level of abstraction allows product engineers to concentrate on product strategy, user experience, and overall system architecture without being bogged down by the intricacies of individual technologies.

The incorporation of AI into software development encourages a broader perspective, where the choice of technology becomes a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.

While AI didn't create the product engineer role; it has made becoming a true product engineer much more accessible as a career path for software engineers.

Combining Product Thinking and Technical Execution

Product thinking involves understanding the user's needs, market demands, and the business goals that drive a product's development. It's about seeing beyond the immediate task to grasp how each piece fits into the broader puzzle of the user experience.

Product engineers ask the crucial questions: "Why is this important? Who is the user? How can we measure the success of our work?"

They don't just build features based on specifications; they contribute to the design and roadmap of the product through a robust understanding of the customer's needs and business strategy.

This approach requires a balance of skills: the ability to dive deep into coding and system architecture, while also keeping an eye on the product roadmap and customer feedback.

By combining this mindset with quality technical execution, product engineers can uniquely ensure the product is headed to the right direction both technically and strategically, ensuring that their work directly contributes to the product's long term success.