“Product engineer” seems to be a fashionable term on posts now that we have AI like we made a sudden discovery of engineers value.

“Product engineer” seems to be a fashionable term on posts now that we have AI like we made a sudden discovery of engineers value.

IMO all engineers should have been always been product engineers. Full stop.

I love building with AI. I loved it two plus years ago when I first saw what it could do, because I’m an engineer and an architect and care about delivering value not code. I can design something in my head, and AI can build it with my brain dump of what good looks like.

The most important part is that it gives engineers more opportunity to focus on what actually matters.

What should we build? Why are we building it? What outcome are we trying to achieve?

I’ve never accepted product telling me “Go build this..“. “Here are your tickets and requirements..".

Don’t tell me what to build. Tell me what you’re trying to achieve.

Then engineering, product and the business can work out the best way to achieve it.

Software engineering is not a construction line. I’ve seen teams with beautiful code, completed tickets, green RAG reports and perfectly delivered sprints……while the CTO is getting hammered by the CEO because the business still isn’t getting the outcome it needs.

Everything is green. Except the thing that actually matters. Value.

That disconnect has existed for years, engineers completing work instead of solving problem and AI is going to expose it brutally. I hate Scrum Agile with a passion, and sprints for making delivering anything the goal, tell me you can't do something of a higher value than you are working on because you've planned your sprint and I'll give you hell. You sprint goal is not the business goal.

If your entire contribution is taking a ticket, turning it into code and moving it to Done, AI can do that. If copying the ticket into an AI tool makes it faster and that's all you do then as an engineer you add no value, and your value of 0 will be obvious.

The value of an engineer was never typing the code.

It is understanding the problem. Challenging the solution. Understanding the system. Making trade-offs. Helping the business achieve the outcome it actually needs.

So yes, be a “product engineer” if you haven't before, that's now the only job and you should have always been, not just be an engineer. The fact that there's two terms screams the problem and glad there's only one job spec now.

Care about the product. Care about the business. Care about the outcome. Code is not the deliverable, it never was.

Code is just one means to an end, something necessary to build a software, perfect code has no value if it doesn't solve a real problem. Delivery code and tickets and sprints is not delivering value with Ai generated or manually coded in never was.