Earlier this month we made it official: our Software Engineers will now be known as Product Engineers!
While not a new concept, it requires our engineering team to lean into new skills: talking to customers, digging into usage data, testing other products and brainstorming experiments to make our product better. It will no longer be enough to write code.
Here’s why I made the decision:
1. As an early stage startup with a working product, its time for me to spend more time selling. This means spending less time diving deep into product implementation details (I still spend equal time on design).
2. The best engineers I’ve worked with have a strong product sense. Engineers usually bring the best solutions/ideas to the table because they understand the underlying technology and can map customer needs to what is feasible today. But it starts with the product sense.
3. It is critical for engineers to develop this skill in the age of AI-assisted coding. As AI gets better at automating coding, one of the ways engineers of the future will be able to stand out is having a deep understanding of “how” to build products users love.
I am confident this move will make our products better long term.
Looking forward.
#startup #engineering #ai
