Product Engineers
Short opinionated trendCTO Circle Issue 003 ↗
Product engineers are not new. We are just noticing them more now.
People like Gergely Orosz and Marty Cagan have been talking about this for years. The difference is that AI is making it painfully obvious.
A strong product engineer builds better. They can own a project end to end, make smarter tradeoffs, catch edge cases early, understand business priorities, and avoid a lot of pointless rework.
There used to be an excuse: coding was hard, engineering time was expensive, so developers should just code and execute neatly packaged requirements. That was already weak logic before. With AI, it looks even weaker.
A few opinions on this trend:
- It's much easier to learn enough product to be useful than enough engineering to be useful. Basic product judgment can already make you practical. Basic engineering knowledge usually cannot. AI can handle a lot of the shallow implementation work. The engineering knowledge that really matters now is the deep kind: understanding systems, reading code critically, spotting risks, and making sound technical decisions.
- Rigorous code reading and review matter more.
- Communication and good team dynamics matter more.
- Architectural judgment matters more.
- Learning to code well may actually get harder for juniors or product people, especially when they are pushed to ship fast with AI. They often do not understand what they are doing.
- People who are genuinely strong at both product and engineering are rare, but probably more valuable than ever. I believe the ideal product and engineering team is made up mostly of product engineers with full ownership, supported by roles such as DevOps, DevEx, SREs, and platform engineers.
- Reads on this trend:
- Product engineers at Posthog
- The Product-Minded Software Engineer by Gergely Orosz
- Empowered Product Teams by Marty Cagan
Originally published in CTO Circle Issue 003.