Product Engineers
I recently read a good thread on Product Engineers by Matt Swanson, and it got me thinking.
I strongly identify as a Product Engineer. Not as: - Developer (I only like building user-facing things) - Full stack (I want to help with shaping, roll-out, strategy) - Entrepreneur (not interested in company building) - Indie hacker (like working with team, not into quick and dirty stuff) - Design/Dev unicorn (my design taste > my skill) I really like going from a customer problem into "potential solution mode" and then taking it all the way to code on production. I'm having trouble finding (...and hiring) people like me. Who should I be talking to?
Over time I’ve learned that engineers can be motivated by very different things:
- Hard problems
- Performance and scalability
- Elegant code or system design
- Deeply understanding their craft
All of these are valuable, but they’re very different from what drives a Product Engineer: delivering user-facing product and real customer value.
Replying to @_swanson
I feel similar. I used to think most engineers in our industry were product focused. I have learned that, at least to be great at it, it’s a pretty special skill and not something most engineers are as focused on.
When a startup is tiny, it needs everyone to wear multiple hats, and the “product engineer” role is the most crucial one, in my opinion.
Over time, specialization becomes necessary, and the hard (and important) thing becomes good cross-functional collaboration.
But still – working with engineers who are especially laser-focused on delivering customer value is special.
Why is it hard to hire Product Engineers later on?
Why is it hard to have (or hire) true Product Engineers past the early startup phase?
One big reason is that technical complexity, design quality expectations, and the “risk of shipping the wrong thing” all increase as a company grows.
Even if you only consider technical complexity: the larger the company, the less likely it is that any one engineer can build an entire user-facing feature independently, at a high level of quality.