Bring a Product Manager Mindset to Your Next Engineering Job
If you haven’t already seen a job listing for a “product engineer,” you probably will soon. The job everyone’s suddenly hiring for, this role is like a cross between a product manager and an engineer (as the name suggests). And it’s a hiring trend worth paying attention to. Companies are opening more of these roles every single month, but they’re struggling to fill them. The reason has almost nothing to do with engineers’ coding skills or years of experience. The best career move you can make to prepare for these types of roles has almost nothing to do with getting more technical. Instead, it comes down to one of the fluffiest, most overused, and potentially cringiest words in all of tech: mindset. Stick with me, I promise this goes somewhere useful. The problem: We were trained to be task-takers When I started out, my job looked like this: Drive to an office. Sit through meetings that led to other meetings until a project manager handed me a task they’d already chopped into tiny pieces. My job was to turn that task into code. It took years for me to get good at a coding language and tech stack, and once I did, I executed that knowledge against specs that somebody else wrote. You know what’s freakishly good at that exact job? I’ll give you a hint: It starts with A and ends with I. Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, recently said: “coding is basically solved,” and “the bottleneck is going to be good ideas.” So if your entire value is “hand me a task and I’ll build it,” you’re in a footrace with the robots. I don’t like that for you. The bad news... that is also good news Many companies are flattening. Middle management is getting stripped out, for better or worse (mostly for worse), which means many of us are doing more with less. This might sound like purely more work, but it’s also an opening for anyone who cares about what they’re building and can put on their manager hat. Companies are no longer just hunting for the strongest engineer in one narrow domain. What’s rare, and what actually moves revenue, is an engineer who can spot the thing that’s quietly costing money and either flag it to leadership or just go fix it. What this actually looks like Being product-minded has NOTHING to do with your tech stack. Here’s where to start: Have an opinion and back it up. As a former engineering manager, the worst thing I ever heard was silence. I’d often ask the team what they thought because I doubted myself and wanted a gut check. I was grateful to the ones who said “nope, bad idea, here’s why.” Pushback is a gift. Learn the domain, casually. Work for a plumbing company? You don’t need to become a plumber, but spend an hour on Reddit threads where plumbers vent. Now your ideas come from your potential customers. Make experiments cheap and safe. This is where any engineer has massive leverage. Experiments are not free. A bad one loses customers and frustrates users. Tools like LaunchDarkly and Optimizely let you ship a change to 5 percent of us…