Rise of the Product-Focused Engineer

An old colleague reached out this week with a familiar frustration. They're overseeing engineering at a growing company and while they've hired really bright engineers, they spend half their time redirecting them from interesting technical challenges to actual business problems.

This made me realize how common this problem has become—and why it's about to get even more important.

The Product-Focused Engineer

What they're looking for is what I call the product-focused engineer. These are software engineers with a strong sense of ownership (almost an obsession) over the product areas of the software they're working on.

They're usually characterized by being very proactive with product ideas and opinions, striving for high quality user experiences while being mindful of quick validation cycles. They prefer pragmatic solutions to unblock users and deeply care about making their users successful. I recommend reading Gergely Orosz's article if you want to learn more about these roles.

In past organizations that I've been hiring for, it's always been hard to find these engineers that can connect to your user base and strive to build great product experiences. However, individuals with these traits have been far more impactful for the companies than their peers.

In traditional software companies, teams usually consist of very few of these engineers with more general purpose engineers being the main ingredient and product managers making up for it.

However, we're in a world now where more and more software companies are promising to replace engineers with AI agents over the next few years, so naturally, these structures are changing fast. A single product-focused engineer with AI assistance can now prototype, test, and ship features that previously needed many more people.

What This Means for Engineering Teams

I'm writing this now because I think the future of engineering teams will center much more around this archetype. High-agency individuals that are striving to build the best experiences possible while making pragmatic trade-offs. They won't need large teams to do what traditional teams were doing before, but instead they'll leverage the new tools available to them and just ship.

My prediction is that the demand for these engineers will skyrocket. Companies that cling to traditional team structures with layers of handoffs will be outpaced by small teams of product-obsessed builders who just ship.

If you're an engineer reading this, the best investment you can make isn't learning another framework. It's developing that product instinct—talking to users, understanding business metrics, and treating code as a means to an end rather than the end itself.

The engineers who thrive in the next decade won't be the ones writing the most elegant code. They'll be the ones who can't sleep because they know exactly which user problem they're solving tomorrow.