The Product Engineer
Early on in my career, I was fortunate enough to have a role model who made a lasting impression on the type of engineer I could be. I still recall the passion and depth they brought to how we designed our products, the spirited discussions they’d engage in across the company, and the impact they had in how we served our customers. This was my first view of a great product engineer at work, and in the years since, I’ve developed a deeper perspective on the role. In this post, I want to share some of the key traits of this engineering archetype, and how they can be profoundly impactful for the teams they work on. Let’s dive in.
Starting with the user
The defining characteristic of the product engineer is a genuine curiosity and interest in understanding and solving problems for users. Beyond the technologies they work with, product engineers take the time to learn about their respective domains and truly understand the needs they’re building for.
Put another way, they care deeply about the “why” behind their work, and aren’t satisfied by simply delivering on specs handed to them. Because of this trait, their role in building great software extends far beyond pure implementation — they act as true owners in developing amazing products for their users.
Product intuition and insight
Being so hands-on with the constant evolution of their product, these engineers typically develop strong product intuition. They naturally generate new ideas, spot areas of improvement, and call out corner-cases. They develop strong opinions, which means new features are questioned with rigor before making it into the product.
Product engineers also offer an important perspective for planning: accurate estimations of technical costs. Leveraging this insight, they can spot low-hanging fruit and propose creative paths to solve user problems. This gives their team options and the context necessary to make informed trade-offs, which helps craft product roadmaps that weigh both engineering effort and customer value.
Breadth of skills
Product engineers typically enjoy owning features end-to-end, and they develop multi-dimensional skill sets to do so. It’s not uncommon to see them proactively exploring, pitching, or analyzing the impact of new features — all in addition to actually building them.
This lends toward becoming pragmatic generalists who don’t shy away from learning new things. Putting customers first, they’re flexible in adopting or building whatever technologies are most effective in meeting customer goals.
Adapting to change
Customer needs and market factors constantly evolve, and product strategies can pivot as new insights are discovered. To operate in this type of environment, product engineers learn to move and adapt swiftly.
They develop intuition on balancing speed with robustness. They know short customer feedback cycles are key to iterating towards the best possible product, and seek efficient ways to test and ship workable solutions that produce new learnings.
Investing in foundations
Despite a bias towards speed, great product engineers also realize their ability to serve customers in the long run depends on the leverage of the platforms they build on top of. Consequently, they take time to leave things in a better state than they found them, contributing improvements through fixes, feedback, or documentation.
Collaborating with their platform engineering counterparts, they leverage their deep user knowledge to inform and influence technical designs that account for the end user’s needs, both of today and tomorrow. Recognizing the importance of this work, they’re skilled in advocating for it to business stakeholders.
Great communication
As they need to work both cross-functionally and with other engineering teams to be successful, product engineers are usually great communicators. When collaborating with other engineers, they’re advocates for the customer and can clearly explain relevant business objectives to orient technical discussions.
When communicating with product and design stakeholders, they translate engineering trade-offs effectively for non-technical audiences. They understand that in a team setting, verbal and written communication can be just as powerful as code in their pursuit to build amazing experiences for their users.
Conclusion
I’ll finish up on a personal note. I’ve built products working in a variety of engineering roles and also as a pure product manager. I personally believe that the role a product engineer plays can be one of the most gratifying and impactful in a company. You’re able to understand and shape every aspect of a product, from how it’s built to the experience it delivers, and you can provide tremendous value through the unique perspective you bring to the table.
This depends, of course, on finding an organization that recognizes and supports this type of profile. Here at Pave, our products to date have been heavily driven by the direction and leadership of talented product engineers who partner closely with our customer-facing teams. We believe that the best products are built when the entire team truly understands and empathizes with the end user — and empowering product engineers is one of the ways we embody this value.
