The product engineering mindset

How to be a productive software engineer in a modern product team

A Product Engineer has a deep understanding of what it takes to craft and deliver software that provides value to end users and they have the desire and aptitude to instrument and monitor signals that provide the right indication that the end user is indeed deriving value from the product. They are data driven and thus seek out information that could provide insights into significantly evolving or maintaining the product in a trajectory that continues to delight the end user.

The user is at the core of their strategy and they have a passion to provide some value to that user in a measurable way. The product engineer also has an affinity to understand the domain and delve into the conceptual design space of opportunities for the product in that domain. The design space here does not merely refer to a visual design space but a more foundational functional or operational design space of possibilities on how to solve a problem. They know how to build a product that fits the users needs today but can evolve fast in response to the opportunities in the design space triggered by direct feedback from users or indirect insights derived from evaluating the product in use.

A good product engineer participates actively in the distinct phases of a product delivery process. During discovery, they are able to ask questions about the domain that exposes the design space enough to understand how to map real world user needs to the right abstract concepts in technology. They understand the value of prototyping and know when to prototype at different levels of detail. They are able to architect and make technology choices that ensures both functional and non functional product requirements are met while iteratively creating a product that meets the user's needs.

Since the product engineer is keen to measure value delivered to user, they continuously think about methods for evaluating an intervention during delivery and show keen interest in methods for researching the problem space during discovery. They are familiar with the concept of experimentation; they are excited to understand outputs from user research; and they relish the opportunity to look at production usage data in order to get objective insights on real user behaviour and explore creative ways to continue to bring value to the user.

There is a lot more to building a great product team than having engineers (or indeed product managers, experience designers etc) who share the mindset described above. For instance the detail of research and experimentation is a significant part of a great product strategy and requires expertise to ensure things are done rigorously. The mindset discussed here goes alongside the technical rigour of building applications that are secure, resilient and scalable.