The Product Engineer
Fusing Vision and Execution
The landscape of software engineering is evolving. If you build software, you've likely noticed the changing winds and shifting sands. This transformation is both exciting and unsettling, reshaping the types of software being developed and altering many traditional roles. Over the past decade, a new role has emerged: the Product Engineer. This role combines product management and software engineering, bridging between ideas, plans, and execution.
This article is the first in a series to explore the Product Engineering discipline in depth. The motivations behind this series are three-fold:
Software engineering is in the beginning innings of upheaval. Large Language Models (LLMs) have given a broader surface area for builders to execute prototypes and prove concepts. This will give rise to more diverse developers focusing on breadth over depth.
The Product Engineer archetype is solidifying. They solve a distinct set of challenges. This makes it more prudent to establish a common language and description to characterize the role.
Organizations need a framework to understand how the product engineering discipline can benefit their teams. This writing aims to help organizations identify when this role is needed and how to find the right talent to strengthen the connection between product and engineering.
This article starts with a broad overview. Later articles will discuss:
A Field Guide for the Product Engineer
How to become one and how to hire one
Interviews and stories with other Product Engineers
Introduction
The Product Engineer is a cross-functional role that blends product management and software engineering. They bridge across two teams to refine the software products the team should build and how to validate the hypotheses that go into the product. They are both strategists and builders, with a primary focus on alignment. They work to ensure that the team's motivations for building are harmonized with the execution plan of how to build it.
If you're lucky enough to look around and see team members who embody these traits — count your lucky stars. You have probably witnessed their value firsthand. That person might even be you! This author argues that we should identify this as a distinct role, clarify its responsibilities, and hold space within organizations to give these hybrid engineers an area to operate.
The Product Engineer's Domain
To understand where Product Engineers operate and how they impact the decision-making process, let's first examine the three planes of building software products.
The "Why" Plane: This is the realm of purpose and vision. It's where organizations understand customer pain points, uncover latent needs, and articulate the fundamental reason for a product's existence. This plane answers the question: "Why are we building this?"
The "What" Plane: Here, hypotheses are formed and planned. This plane is all about determining the most effective ways to address customer needs through software solutions. It's where ideas are transformed into concrete features and functionalities. The key question is: "What should we build to solve our customers' problems?"
The "How" Plane: This is the domain of execution. It involves a systematic, principled approach of how to build sustainable and flexible software. This plane focuses on the technical implementation, asking: "How do we build this solution in the best way possible?"
Historically, product managers have owned the "Why" and "What" planes. They've been the stewards of user needs and product vision, while engineering has primarily operated in the "How" plane, focusing on technical implementation.
The emergence of the Product Engineer role disrupts this traditional paradigm. Product Engineers embody the "What" plane. They bring technical expertise and a builder's mindset to the table, collaborating with product managers to shape the product's direction. This collaborative approach helps the team make better tradeoffs. It's an effective partnership with product and design because there is a mutual desire to build high-craft products in the way that most effectively addresses customer needs.
An easy way to conceptualize where the Product Engineer role fits is to contrast its responsibilities to a more well-known archetype, the Startup CTO. The Startup CTO is the trail-blazing technology leader who strategizes the best approach to monetize and distribute technology to the market. They collaborate with various stakeholders to formulate a ruthlessly pragmatic approach to what and how technology is built. The notable differences between the Product Engineer and the Startup CTO are the additional responsibilities of business strategy and engineering management. The Product Engineer is a lean, cross-functional builder, but they are not responsible for structuring the team to sustain innovation and position the offerings to achieve market success. (If you're a Product Engineer doing those things, it might be time to ask for a raise and title change 🥲)
Core Competencies of a Product Engineer
Product engineers are validators first. They want to validate concepts in the most pragmatic way possible. In contrast to a software engineer, the Product Engineer’s first solutions might not always involve building software. They seek to gain enough knowledge to unlock the team's confidence in building more systematic solutions. They also act as evangelists for the customer throughout the development process, aiming to turn other developers on the team into product-focused builders. Their goal is to infuse everything they've learned during product strategizing, planning, and experimenting into all facets of delivery.
What characteristics make this person thrive in this role? Here are some of the standout qualities I've seen for this archetype.
Insatiable curiosity
They use first principles thinking to deduce the "why" behind ideas. They are pros at deconstructing ideas, thoughts, and intentions. They approach problem-solving with empathy and a desire to understand human behavior. They use this curiosity to optimize the most effective way to build, determining where it's appropriate to simplify or when to innovate and use new technologies.
Tradeoffs intuition
They seek to understand the tradeoffs between spending extra time on delightful concepts versus finding quick wins, fast insights, and compounding gains. They use intuition to understand when a minimal concept will not yield directional product insights. They also use this intuition to help the product team understand the strongest scope and sequencing plan.
Communicative, collaborative mindset
They excel at drawing out expertise from team members and synthesizing diverse opinions and concerns. They ask thoughtful, yet pressing questions to help the team find resolutions. Furthermore, they can describe the logic behind the decision-making conclusions. As intermediaries, they can fluently describe the product vision and the engineering constraints.
Murky water swimmers
They have comfort in ambiguous problem spaces because they have confidence in their approach to finding solutions. Since engineering time is precious, they seek to identify the most important proof points before dedicating the team's resources to more robust solutions. This often involves prototypes that address the biggest product and engineering concerns
Technological breadth
The most effective Product Engineer can reason about the comprehensive solution. To be able to make the appropriate tradeoffs they should have a strong knowledge of all parts of the software stack and can make strong estimations of each part of the implementation. Product engineers do not need to have deep working knowledge infrastructure or the full-stack, but it does help to broaden their impact across teams.
The Impact of Product Engineers
What are the deliverables of the Product Engineer that yield impact on the team? What expectations should you broadly expect for them within an organization? There are few areas where Product Engineers make a unique impact within organizations.
Alignment
The most crucial impact of Product Engineers is their ability to align the "why" of building with the "what" approach the team should take. They constantly remind the team of the product's purpose and user needs, helping to make technical decisions that keep the end user in mind. This alignment leads to more cohesive and user-centric products.
Role Expectation: A great Product Engineer creates a product-led culture within the engineering team. They lead other engineers to think beyond code and consider the broader impact of their work on the customer and user experience. This mindset shift will lead to more effective software solutions and a team that is disciplined in assessing user value.
Strengthening product management
In teams with less experienced product management, Product Engineers can help tighten up processes and bring more structure to product decisions. Conversely, in teams with strong product management, they act as valuable sounding boards, providing technical context and helping refine concepts before they reach the broader engineering team.
Role Expectation: The Product Engineering role is a partnership and not a replacement for a product manager. The Product Engineer is expected to help distill customer observation, market research, and strategy into provable hypotheses that can be built and verified.
Driving validation and measurement
Product Engineers push the team to critically evaluate the success of features. They advocate for clear success metrics and encourage regular assessment of features after launch. This focus on validation helps teams learn faster and iterate more effectively
Role Expectation: A successful Product Engineer should champion using qualitative and quantitative metrics to validate the effectiveness of product features. They should help establish processes for continuous measurement and should be actively involved in customer interviews and feedback. By promoting a culture of hypothesis-driven decision-making, they help the team quickly adapt to user feedback and market changes.
Craftsmanship
Product engineers are driven by a profound desire to create products that resonate with their customers. They are committed to finding the most optimal approach to building world-class software, embracing a craftsmanship mindset that prioritizes both functionality and user satisfaction. This dedication to quality ensures that the products they develop are not only technically sound but also a pleasure to use, ultimately enhancing user happiness and engagement.
Role Expectation: Product engineers should be expected to have a strong sense of the end-user experience. They strive to push towards a cohesive and well-thought-out experience, balancing an overarching vision with attention to specific execution details. You can expect them to zoom out to see the big picture and then zoom in to execute on implementation. They should be able to recognize opportunities and advocate for product ideas that enhance the overall quality of the experience. Expect them to push these ideas upwards within the organization. Additionally, they should ruthlessly prioritize work that aligns with customer value, ensuring effort contributes directly to a better user experience.
Challenges and Pitfalls
Managing motivation
Product Engineers often face the challenge of managing motivation, especially when dealing with purely technical tasks that lack direct ties to user value. Long periods of working on known problems with static solutions can be draining and demotivating. When there are heavy implementation restrictions, no connection to user impact, or an inability to measure feature success, the sparks of creativity that fuel Product Engineers can diminish.
Spreading too thin
There is a recent trend of expecting Product Engineers to fulfill both product manager and engineer roles. However, relying solely on the intuition and craft of the Product Engineer is not a substitute for good product management. The Product Engineer's role focuses on enhancing the product development cycle, while the product manager more effectively handles user interviews, market research, positioning, and project management. Conversely, there is also a risk of spreading too thin in the development realm. Product Engineers should leverage the engineering team's depth, bringing the team along instead of monopolizing the implementation. The goal is to focus on alignment and encourage all engineers to deliver the most effective solutions within those constraints.
Carving out your role
Organizations accustomed to traditional software development models often struggle to empower Product Engineers because they are not used to conceptualizing where the role's strengths and advantages lie. A common issue arises when product and design teams present a high-fidelity concept claimed to be ready for development, often based on assumptions about feasibility and time constraints. In such cases, Product Engineers must advocate for their role to demonstrate their value earlier in the product cycle. Articles like this can help team members better understand and appreciate the edges of this role.
Conclusion
Product engineers are pivotal in bridging the gap between product management and engineering, ensuring alignment between strategic vision and technical execution. They foster a product-led culture within engineering teams, encouraging consideration of the broader customer experience. By strengthening product management processes, building for validation, and advocating for a strong user experience, Product Engineers help create user-centric products that are both functional and delightful.
As I continue this series, I’ll explore the path to becoming a Product Engineer, the hiring process, and the stories of those excelling in this role. By establishing a clear framework for understanding the product engineering discipline, this series aims to help organizations leverage the full benefits of these dynamic, cross-functional engineers.