11 Mar 2025
What if every engineer could own the roadmap, talk to customers, and ship features as fast as they did on the day you first launched your product? That’s the pitch for the Product Engineer. A software engineer who wears a product hat, owning the roadmap, talking to customers, and writing the code to bring their vision to life. It sounds like an incredible opportunity for software engineers who have a passion for building great products, not just writing great code.
In the ideal version of the story, the builders (engineers) are freed to do their best work by eliminating the bureaucracy that traditional product management and design bring. If you unleash the builders, they will build the best version of your product by using their own product sense and their technical skills to iterate and ship faster than any traditional product team could ever hope to achieve. The heroic narrative goes beyond the 10x engineer to the lone wolf engineer who not only writes the best code faster than anyone else, but has the vision to deliver the greatest product ever seen.
This is an appealing story for engineers and engineering leaders, many of whom have encountered frustrating red tape and bad ideas from product management and design who do not produce anything but PRDs, impossible to implement mocks, and never-ending meetings and process without ever figuring out how to ship value to customers.
“Let builders build” and get out of the way is hard to maintain when product engineers in the let builders build model meet reality.
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Four-minute read
04 Mar 2025
The way you guide the direction of your product changes after you reach product-market fit. Before, you were wandering through the backcountry searching for something. You weren’t quite sure what you were searching for, but you’d know it when you found it.
One day, you find it. And now you have a whole new challenge ahead.
You aren’t wandering anymore. You know where you are on the map, and you know where your destination is. But there are innumerable routes between here and there. Which route do you choose? How do you check your bearings along the way?
You take in directional inputs from every possible channel, and then you use your intuition to chart the right course. And then you move ahead to the next visible landmark on the route, check your inputs again, and adjust if you’ve gotten off course.
To learn to navigate in this way, we need to know the inputs we have access to. Before product-market fit, our inputs are more limited. After product-market fit, as we begin to scale, we suddenly have many more inputs and we need to use them all to stay on track.
So, what inputs do we have access to? How should we use these inputs to guide our product decisions? Let’s take a look.
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10-minute read
25 Feb 2025
A founder at a 100 employee SaaS company once told me that he didn’t delegate anything important to his team because he couldn’t trust them.
They had repeatedly failed to meet his expectations on key projects so when something was really critical to get right, he took it on himself. He delegated to his team, but only work that he didn’t feel was critical to the business. He trusted himself to deliver, and he had gotten the company this far. He knew he could do the work, and do it well, and he knew his team couldn’t. He said this with no self-reflection that the common denominator in the failures was him.
You’ll be surprised to learn that the company he led is no longer in business.
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Three-minute read