Why You Need Product Engineers
And not software engineers
A couple of weeks ago, I attended our quarterly MAHOS (Mergify All Hands On-Site)—an event where we gather the whole Mergify team together for a week—and gave a small speech about product engineers.
I was unsure if I coined the term product engineer at that time or if it already existed. After Googling, I found that I was not the only one who realized that we no longer need software engineers.
When we started our venture a few years ago and decided to hire engineers, we naturally looked for software engineers. We found great engineers. They learned a ton of stuff working with us over the last couple of years and became very efficient at producing code. Awesome. I wrote last month about how to become a great software engineer, and while I hold to this, the next step in your career, if you want to work in a product-oriented startup, is to become a product engineer.
What is a Product Engineer?
Is that just a software engineer building a product? Yes! But that is not what a software engineer does by default. Let me tell you an anecdote.
Last month, with my product owner hat on, I wrote a user story explaining one of the changes we needed to make in Mergify: feature X is enabled by default in the product, which is annoying because most users do need it. We need to 1. allow the users to enable or disable it and 2. make it disabled by default.
One of our software engineers picks the ticket and implements a solution. Here’s what they do:
The feature X can be enabled or disabled;
The feature X is disabled by default;
An error message warns the user constantly that feature X is currently disabled and that they need to enable it to have it work. There’s a giant red banner to warn users that feature X is disabled—until the user has enabled the feature.
When I see that, I’m really confused. The code is great, and the ticket is indeed implemented, but the last part is terrible from a user experience perspective. It forces the user to enable feature X to get rid of the warning, meaning we get back to a point where users have to enable feature X by default, even if they don’t need it, just because they’re confused.
That is great software engineering work but terrible product engineering work. In no case did the engineer put themself in the user's shoes or try to understand why we needed that change.
This is where a product engineer must shine. They need to understand the value and the reason behind the code they write, taking into account the product, its roadmap, its priorities, etc. It requires the ability to do trade-offs by being pragmatic. They need to be obsessed with the customer and understand their problem. In a startup, you need to ship fast, meaning, again, doing trade-offs and being efficient and practical. They need to be detail-oriented, have a sense of ownership, and be on the look to create terrific experiences.
Writing software has never been so easy. With AI on the rise, writing actual code will have less and less value.
The core value of building software is going to be whatever AI is not yet able to do, which is empathy—connecting with and learning from other human beings’ needs.
How to Transform Engineers in Product Gurus
Based on the description I wrote above, we implemented some changes and made good progress overall. The improvements we made were due to simple changes we made to the organization.
Connect engineers with customers. Doing support directly with customers, joining a demo call, spending time in a booth during an event, and talking to prospects. All those activities where engineering can interact with prospects and customers are very valuable;
Explain the why, not the how. As a product owner, you must explain why changes are being made and not how they should be made. The more context you feed into your user stories, the easier for an engineer is to make the right decision when building a feature or fixing a problem. It’s especially important when, as a product manager, you have a technical background and you could be tempted to dictate a solution.
There are many software engineers out there, but not many product engineers. We’ll be on the lookout for that when hiring in the future. And if you want to join a product-oriented startup in the future, make sure you change your mindset to not just writing code. 😉