| Do people think the product engineer can be trained? One issue I run into is one of expectations. I think product engineers are treated like some sort of unicorn (a designer/coder). I can see why that might have been true in 2000. But a lot has changed since then. For one, being a product engineer could be considered a hack for picking up tech skills quickly. It's often much easier to learn by doing and product engineers define themselves by the product they're trying to build. Plus, software got so much easier to build. What is your reaction to that? Do you go deeper and more esoteric than you used to be able to go? Or do you go broader? Broader makes sense to me--that's the product engineer. But to what end? Do you go broader in order to save on team size? An engineer/designer means you can skip a design hire. Or do you go broader because you can have more autonomy? To me, product engineers are the natural outcome of software getting easier (and design to some extent). People can have more autonomy because you can develop the skills to get more done on your own. But I don't think management has caught up. There's still an assumption that these skill sets don't go together. Autonomy is killed when you have specialist designers and specialist engineers. And that's why I led with the idea about training product engineers. I want to be able to create a culture at my company that assumes that you're a product engineer. Junior product engineers just work on smaller problems. |