The Rise of Product Engineering

Originally published on BlockSimplified — 4 min read Something I told every new engineer who joined my team: "You are not a frontend engineer. You are not a backend engineer. Those are just tags for the domain where you have depth. You are a product engineer." Most of them looked confused. Some pushed back. But the ones who got it became the strongest engineers I have worked with. Marcin Roszczyk wrote something recently that put words to what I have been saying for years: AI is not killing software engineering. It is exposing what engineering actually is. For the past two decades, we called millions of people software engineers, but most of the work was implementation. Assembling systems, translating requirements into code. Now that AI can implement faster than any of us, the gap is visible. I agree. And I have seen this play out firsthand leading teams of 10 to 14 engineers as a Tech Lead and Principal Engineer. For years, our industry rewarded implementation volume. Ship tickets. Cl