How to Become a Product Engineer 🎨
A practical guide that include technical workflows, responsibilities, and psychological tricks.
A couple of months ago, we explored how engineering management is changing, discussing the trend towards more technical managers and more autonomous engineers.
As we anticipated in 2022 already, this shift is giving rise to a new breed of software engineers: the so called product engineers.
In this brave new world, product engineers own entire features, from analysis to post-launch iteration, bridging the gap between a PM and a traditional developer.
I am writing about this trend pretty often on Refactoring, because I believe it is supremely important: today, only a handful of startups work this way, but a few years from now, once AI is everywhere, this will likely be what is expected of all engineers.
But what does product engineering look like in practice? What are the workflows that enable this shift?
Today’s article addresses it from a very practical angle, covering how the best teams are building product, and what engineers and PMs respectively do over the whole feature lifecycle.
The goal is to give you a blueprint of what a product engineer looks like, what they do, and how to turn into one.
Here's what we'll cover:
🚀 Why now? — a quick recap of the rise of product engineering, its benefits, examples, and why it's happening now.
🔄 The product engineering workflow — the core responsibilities and workflows of a product engineer, including feature management, data-driven development, and collaboration with PMs and customers.
🏋️♀️ Overcoming transition challenges — addressing the hurdles you might face when becoming a product engineer, including expanding your skillset, balancing responsibilities, and finding support.
Let's dive in!
To write this piece I am partnering with Rasmus Makwarth, founder of Bucket and ex Director of Product Mgmt at Elastic. Rasmus is one of the most knowledgeable people I know about product, and is at the very forefront of this shift with Bucket.
I am also a fan of Bucket itself, and I encourage you to try it, but as always I will always write only my unbiased opinion about all the practices and services covered in the article, Bucket included.
If you like it, they are kindly offering Refactoring readers 10% off their Pro plan for 1 year with REFACT0924.
🚀 The Rise of Product Engineers
Today’s push for product engineers fits a broader trend in making product / tech roles wider and giving people more ownership and autonomy.
So, in a way, product engineers are to engineers what product managers are to product owners.
In traditional Scrum, product owners have mostly tactical duties: they groom the backlog, manage tickets, and deal with short-to-mid-term execution. Today, in healthy teams, a lot of these tasks are delegated to engineers, while product people (PMs) take on more long-term & strategy thinking.
So we gradually went from this:
To this:
This trend is not exactly new — here is how Intercom defined product engineers back in 2022:
As a product engineer, you'll be taking ownership of real customer problems by building smart, efficient solutions to both back-end and front-end systems.
The key part here is full ownership of customer problems — that means, designing a solution + dealing with the whole stack.
The benefits for teams are obvious. Fewer people involved + more vertically integrated equals easier coordination, higher engagement, and higher impact per single engineer.
Today, this trend has only accelerated thanks to AI and better tooling, which together reduce engineers’ cognitive load, and allow them to take on more things on their plate.
Still, it’s a brave new world, and we are still figuring out a lot of stuff: what does a new feature lifecycle look like? How do you bridge engineering and product work so that PMs and engineers work well together?
In other words, what does product engineering look like, in practice?
Together with Rasmus, we discussed the traits shared by the best product teams we know, and we isolated two main ones: adoption of data-driven development + a well-defined feature management workflow.
Let’s look at both: