What is a Product Engineer?
One of the things we’ve learned over the years is that the best contributors we’ve worked with possess a ‘product mindset’. Broadly speaking, this means someone who is focused on outcomes, solves problems in a scalable way, and has a solid understanding of modern product development techniques.
In no discipline is this more pronounced than in software engineering, which is inherently more technical and historically more detached from customers.
But companies are learning the benefits of elevating their engineers from purely solving technical problems, to solving their users’ problems in a way that delivers value for the business.
Writing code might be an engineer’s hammer, but they’re no longer reliant on someone telling them where to put the nail, or what to fix. Or as Jean-Michel Lemieux, former Head of Engineering at Shopify puts it:
In many ways this is a return to the original ideas of Agile and a counter movement to the increased specialism and bloat of product and technology roles over the last 20 years.
It’s also hard to discount the current economic climate as a key driver for companies cutting back specialist product management roles and devolving product management responsibilities to adjacent roles, like designers and engineers.
But whether the growing demand for product engineering is driven by maturity or necessity, one thing is clear – we’re going to be seeing a lot more people adopting this title over the coming years.
This article explores:
- What a Product Engineer is
- How they’re different from Software Engineers
- The growing demand for Product Engineers
- Whether they’re a good fit for your business
- How to become a Product Engineer
- Other companies championing product engineering
What is a Product Engineer?
A Product Engineer is a Software or Full-Stack Engineer, that possesses a product mindset and typically demonstrates the following key traits:
- Customer obsession and empathy
Product engineers deeply understand and prioritise user needs and actively participate in user research. - End-to-end ownership
They take full responsibility for the product from ideation to post-launch and accountability for its success. - Data-informed decision making
They rely on data and analytics to guide decisions, using insights from product metrics, user behaviour, and business performance to validate and improve their work. - Proactive and opinionated
Product engineers actively contribute to product strategy, offering suggestions and challenging assumptions. They hold strong opinions based on experience but remain open to adapting their views when new data or perspectives arise. - Bias for action and quick wins
They focus on delivering value quickly through rapid iteration and prototyping. Product engineers prefer to ship early and refine based on real-world feedback, constantly improving the product. - Balancing trade-offs
They are skilled at finding a balance between technical complexity and product value. Product engineers pragmatically make trade-offs to ensure that their solutions maximise impact while minimising unnecessary work. - Strong communication and collaboration
Product engineers work cross-functionally, communicating effectively with other disciplines like design, marketing, and product management. They build strong relationships to ensure the product vision is executed successfully.
Developer vs Software Engineer vs Product Engineer
| Developer | Software Engineer | Product Engineer |
|---|---|---|
| Implements tasks from specs and delivers features. | Solves technical challenges, optimising performance, and ensuring stability. | Balances product and technical goals, iterating quickly to meet user and business needs. |
| Owns code and feature implementation. | Owns code quality, architecture, and scalability. | Owns product outcomes, roadmap, and user success. |
| Works primarily within the engineering team, with minimal user interaction. | Collaborates occasionally with cross-functional teams, receiving indirect user feedback. | Collaborates closely with design, product, and business teams, engaging directly with users. |
| Follows technical requirements and predefined tasks. | Driven by technical best practices, prioritising efficiency and scalability. | Combines user needs with technical decisions, prioritising impact and speed. |
| Concerned with how features are built. | Concerned with how systems are optimised and scalable. | Concerned with why features matter to users and the business. |
The growing demand for product engineering
While we struggled to find good data on job openings for Product Engineers over time, there is clear evidence of a growing interest in the role as shown by the Google Trends data for the search term ‘Product Engineer’.
There are a number of factors are driving this rise in interest, and likely the increasing demand for Product Engineers:
- Companies understand the value
Companies are learning the benefits of elevating their engineers from purely solving technical problems, to solving their users’ problems in a way that delivers value for the business. - A correction of overspecialised roles
Many companies are moving away from strictly defined, specialised roles which have bloated their headcount, increased communication overheads, and slowed delivery with little tangible positive impact on their products. - Advances in software engineering tools
The rise of cloud platforms, maturing frameworks, and AI-driven development tools has made software engineering more accessible and automated. This allows engineers more time to focus on the "why" and "what" of product development rather than getting bogged down in low-level technical complexities. - Interest rates and cutbacks
Unfortunately, specialist Product Manager roles are quite susceptible to redundancies in tough market conditions, forcing adjacent roles like designers and engineers to pick up the mantle.
Is product engineering the right fit for your business?
It’s hard to think of situations where empowering engineers to become active participants in product discovery and strategy, and to take ownership of the end-to-end delivery of value, is a bad thing. However, stripping out specialist Product Managers from your teams and expecting engineers to assume their responsibilities and operate at a similar level, without the right conditions, is a sure-fire recipe for failure.
Firstly, you need strong engineers that have the capacity and appetite to take on these additional responsibilities. Junior engineers who are still honing their craft, or seasoned engineers who have spent their whole careers being spoon-fed requirements, will struggle to adapt to these elevated expectations.
Secondly, they will need the support of the whole organisation. If your company doesn’t have a culture of product thinking, or an embedded Product Operating Model, your newly minted Product Engineers will be quickly consumed by many of the challenges that Product Managers and product leaders spend their day-to-day tackling and shielding their teams from, like stakeholder management and transformation.
Assuming you haven’t just made your entire product function redundant, or you’re an early stage startup, two of the best avenues for embedding product engineering in your business is through hiring, and enablement. Optimising your hiring process and job specs to attract Product Engineers can help attract talent that either comes with a ready-made skillset, or at the least, an ambition to work in this way. Likewise, upskilling your existing engineers in product thinking and modern product development practices, with the support of existing Product Managers, leaders or coaching, can accelerate their transition.
How to become a Product Engineer
Firstly, our advice would be to master your skills as a software engineer, before thinking more broadly about how to drive product impact. Software engineering is a vast and constantly evolving field that requires significant time and dedication to get good, let alone master.
But if you’re already a competent and productive engineer, and you’re interested in developing your product compass, there are some easy steps you can take:
- Get close to your data
As engineers, you’re likely already involved in instrumenting data collection and/or will have access to data sources. Delving into your data and serving up product insights is a great place to start, and will help you think more deeply about the impact of the features and functionality you’re building. - Get close to your users
Next time there’s a customer call or user research planned, get involved. Observe. Take notes. Once you feel more confident, try facilitating a customer interview or usability testing session. This will help you build greater empathy for your end users, and build a critical skillset needed to discover and test new solutions to customers’ problems. - Get close to your strategy
Armed with a deeper appreciation and understanding of your users and product, you’ll be in a better position to start contributing towards your product strategy and roadmap.
Companies championing product engineering
We are certainly not the first company to believe in the power of product engineering, and elevating engineers to take a more holistic role in product development and strategy.
Companies like Shopify and Atlassian have been hiring and developing Product Engineers for the last five years. We’ve also learned a lot from startups like PostHog, June, and Ghost, who regularly share their journey, motivations, and advice on product engineering.
June have also recently wrapped the concept of product engineering into what they call Engineering Driven Development, which is definitely worth a read.
Are we asking too much?
Now that we’ve shared our views on what a Product Engineer is and some practical advice for companies and practitioners, it’s worth stepping back, and asking the question: ‘Is it feasible for engineers to operate at this level?’. Or, to put it more simply: ‘Are we asking too much (of our engineers)?’.
With the role being a relatively recent development, there is limited insight into its long term impact and feasibility. Certainly, the companies listed above seem to believe in it, but in our first-hand experience supporting countless startups, scale-ups, and enterprises, we see product engineering as a hallmark of a mature product organisation, not as a replacement of the Product Manager role.
If you’re a Product Engineer or have embedded product engineering into your organisation, we’d love you hear from you: info@hyperact.co.uk
