Good thread on Product Engineers.
Over time I’ve learned engineers can be motivated by different things:
- Hard problems
- Performance/scalability
- Elegant code or system design
- Deeply understanding their craft
All are valuable but very different than Product Engineers. twitter.com/philfreo/status/1631700836609818635
When a startup is tiny they need everyone to wear multiple hats and the “product engineer” role is most crucial IMO.
Over time specialization is necessary and the hard/important thing is good collaboration cross-functionally.
But still, working with engineers that are especially laser focused on delivering user-facing product / customer value is special.
Original thread: twitter.com/_swanson/status/1631691930345037824
Why is it hard to have/hire true Product Engineers past the early startup phase? One big reason is that technical complexity, design quality, and also "risk of shipping the wrong thing" all increase as a company grows.
Even just taking technical complexity, the larger the company, the less likely any one engineer will be capable of creating an entire user-facing feature independently in high-quality way.