engineer

“MarTech to be really successful. It's really got to target engineers more so than marketers and that a lot of MarTech businesses just aren't very good businesses.”

“There's a, you know, if you're not working every day with a set of engineers on solving problems, you are not a product manager.”

“While the engineers definitely own feasible and the designer definitely owns usable, valuable and viable, which are two of the hardest things to do, that's the product manager.”

“If you ask an engineer about how much time it'll cost to go and build something, and it's something that they came up with, or they're advocating for, it's almost always half the time as something that, like, you are asking for as a PM, right?”

“I know designers spend all this time making wire frames, and I'm like, that's the lamest use of time ever. Just get some whiteboards, go into the room with your engineers, and start making some marks together, and that just works better.”

“I think I agree with my friend Ken Norton on this and that you shouldn't probably start in product. Go be an engineer or be a designer, you know, work, get to know businesses”

“Your job is to make sure that they're aligned with the long-term vision and that they can deliver what they've committed to. But on top of that, they can do whatever the hell they want. And if they're taking on something that puts the things that they committe…”

“And look like there, there's drawbacks to that culture, right? Where you get to like a radically empowered engineering team that thinks that they know the product better than the designer or the PM and they push back on the designs or they disagree with the PM…”

“If you're talking to an early stage company that's a big product and they have six salespeople and two engineers, their product probably isn't going to be great for that much longer.”

“So the engineers are kind of getting the signal that what they need to do is deliver. They're focused on output. That's what they're measured on. So they're kind of disengaged. They're disengaged from the users, from the business. They don't care that much.”

“One of the things that I believe has, you know, a necessary part of building a high functioning Organization is that one, you know, building together is important. So like having engineers and product managers and designers be together, have shared goals and a…”

“Usually what the rule we gave was like, if you have more than three engineers on it, less than three engineers on the problem, consolidate. More than three, it needs a line, right?”

“Like one of my like hobby horses is that I think that we often treat engineers a little bit like children instead of giving them like the responsibilities and ability to actually thrive as adults. And so like, oh, the engineers won't want to do that work. We…”

“One way it happened was they replaced the engineers who used to run the company with lawyers and accountants. Nothing wrong with lawyers and accountants, but they didn't have a feel for this hardware software set of issues. And another was they put in a matrix…”

“I think that most people think that like, oh, hackathons are only a time for engineers to build. And I think that that's one of the biggest mistakes ever. I think that anyone can have an idea and can literally, what I did was like walk around the New York offi…”

“There's this fundamental asymmetry, which is creative. People have to present their ideas to rational people for approval. Okay, fine. Don't mind that never happens the other way around. You never get engineers or accountants saying, well, I think the answer i…”

“And so it's easy, I think for a PM to say, that's not my responsibility. I define the requirements, you know, Have a menu group that goes to the next level. Designer, engineer, figure it out. No way. Like, that's fully on you, and you better be involved in tho…”

“At the end of the day, you should be adding as many constraints as reasonable in order to let engineers and designers come up with the most creative solutions for whatever you're trying to do.”

“I've seen so many times where there's been a PM, engineer, designer, like whatever role, they cannot make it work at company A. And then you see them five years later, just killing it in company B. And you're like, did they change as a person? Did they get sup…”

“What I see happen in those cases is that I see engineers start to over-engineer things because engineers Are like, well, I need to take control of something, right? Like I want to have some creative outlet. So I'm going to use my engineering skills in my creat…”

“PMs, because they're, they tend to be the front facing person for initiatives, they're Talking to customers, they're talking to the executive team, whatever. Engineers sometimes think that they don't get the credit for their work because the PM sort of takes a…”

“PMs are way easier to manage. PMs are awesome to manage. PMs want to, like, they're just so helpful. They're, like, want to do things. They're good communicators. I love managing PMs. I have to say, I just, like, my experience, engineers are such a pain. They …”

“Engineers notoriously, notoriously, notoriously, massively underestimate the migration time for old system to new system, and that causes a lot of problems.”

“So if you are being asked questions that you cannot answer because you just don't know, right? Because that's something that involves a level of technical detail that only the engineers have that you just don't have. And you're, you put yourself in this in-bet…”

“Like I just, my experience is there are plenty of engineers who actually think they can be product managers and they don't really understand all of the elements of the product job. That they would need to be successful.”

“And in five to 10 years, I think the lines between product managers and engineers and designers are going to blur because AI will enable product managers to build prototypes, to build designs, designers to build a pro like Figma already has their Figma AI.”

“There was a period of time at Facebook where I think We, the PMs really had to prove their value to the engineers and show that we were actually not slowing things down with all this extra process.”

“What I want to see is GitHub Copilot deleting one million lines of code. Like that's when, you know, we're actually at this point where this is close to an engineer.”

“Engineers have a tendency to add these little incremental wins that actually ha add. You know, more of a long-term maintenance cost than is clear because you just run a little one month, AB test. You see this, you know, significant when they don't realize the …”

“For a product like ours, it's hard to be, like have product managers that are not engineers say, oh, this is what we should do now, because The right solution to the problem might be entangled in things that are like technical details, or they might be entangl…”

“And the way to cut down on time, and I think this is a mistake people make a lot of the time, is when time is being pressured downward, a lot of times engineers, PMs, designers, they will cut on quality rather than cutting on scope.”

“The dominant failure case that I see in the real world is always again and again, not enough detail. And it's also the most common failure mode where the engineers run back to the product folks and say, I'm not getting enough from you.”

“I think long into the future, yes, there will actually be more demand for engineers.”

“And so if anything, I think there's going to be, I think there's going to be way more product, way more programmers and way more engineers, you know, a few years from now than there are today.”

“It's a quite substantial part of product owners who eventually become very successful, by the way. So it's like a positive self-select. So it means that someone already succeeded in another role. So it's a guaranteed culture match. It's, it, it's a guaranteed …”

“What I've learned though, is like the process of knowing what to ask the AI, how to compose the question, how to even think about like structuring a change between the backend and the front end. Those are still very difficult and specialized skills, and they s…”

“As LLMs get better, it's like people like 10 X engineers would have way more impact. They were going to be a hundred X engineers because they're able to manage LLMs. And it's not necessarily the team size, no, the funding, ah, that, that would be able to win y…”

“In my consulting work, it's more often than not been an engineer who's actually able to get to that specific impact level goal for the team. Sometimes before the product manager does,”

“The trend that we've been seeing for the past five years is a trend that it's gonna accelerate the next five years. And that's a shift to emergent of roles. I just think that we're seeing more designers, engineers, product managers, researchers, kind of all th…”

“We S we changed the organization. So all engineers report into one single team. Now all designers report in one single team and their single head of engineering, single head of design, et cetera.”

“The AI lifecycle both Pre-deployment and post-deployment is very different as compared to a traditional software life cycle. And so, so a lot of old contracts and handoffs between traditional roles, like say PMs and engineers and data folks has now been broken…”

“I think titles are going to collapse and responsibilities are going to collapse and everyone's just going to be building.”

“Both engineers and PMs, 70% of people said they are enjoying their job more. And about 10% said they're enjoying their job less. Designers, interestingly, Only 55% said they're enjoying their job more, and 20% said they're enjoying their job less.”

“I found that product, product leaders, engineers, designers some of the more tend to be more introverted and thoughtful types negotiate more poorly than the obnoxious marketers and revenue leaders and the more extroverted types.”

“In this world of engineers are mini PMs that the engineer who is like highly product minded is a unicorn is an absolute unicorn. I think the same thing is true for PMs where it's like, okay, now, you know, this, in this ratio of the designers really stressed a…”

“Whether you talk about someone who used to be a PM or someone who used to be a designer or called an engineer, the skill is more like being a CEO now, which is what are we building and why? And to be a successful engineer, that trait's critical to be a success…”

“I think that if you have an engineering team of 50 people building things for your customers and you're like, Hey, I want to be the 51st because that's how I get leveraged. I'm like, eh, it's kind of a cheap knockoff of an engineer.”

“I think all of the roles are merging. PMs are doing some engineering work, engineers are doing PM work, designers are PMing and also landing code.”

“I think people who have true agency and they understand that the world around them is malleable will do great. And the folks who stick to what, tell me really, what does it mean to be a PM? What does it mean to be a designer? And like, what's my job as an engi…”

“Like now, not only engineers with, we also have designers, PMs, everybody on the Clark code team checks in code.”

“Data scientists are still going to be experts at Can we trust this data? Are we interpreting it the right way? What's the data versus judgment that we should be applying here? A product manager is still going to be exceptional at saying, have we really framed …”

“Hiring so many PMs infantilizers The engineers and the designers who are perfectly capable of making good decisions, but just never had to, because there was always a PM to babysit them.”

“If you talk to most engineers or even designers, they will remember the great PMs that they've worked with mostly because they've worked with so many bad ones.”

“I do still think that, and maybe this is thinking about it from like a slightly larger company perspective, but I think you do still need people that have certain responsibilities, right? Because if you have one person that's expected to design, to rally a tea…”

“One of the big things that came up was, you know, we see that You know, engineers have 10 or sometimes like hundred extra productivity. But our design team hasn't, right? Because the design process still takes time.”