The Rise of the Product Engineer
DISCLAIMER: While I point some things out from a position of authority, since this is my blog post, I hope to make you all understand I'm just as guilty of fostering some of the bad practices outlined in this article as the engineers I describe here. Often times, I'm the one who made those mistakes.
The Problem: Engineers as Task Takers
I believe 90% of traditional developer jobs will disappear in the next few years. They will disappear not because software engineering is dying, but because it's evolving, and what it means to be a great engineer is changing, fast. Those who are not able to adapt will be left behind.
For too long, many engineers have been often been treated—and have acted—like task takers. In the business sense, they have been treated as glorified contractors with expensive benefits. In this scenario, there was a stakeholder group, they defined exactly what they wanted done, and then a set of tasks was passed to engineers. Once those were completed, the job was successful.
But the future belongs to engineers who think beyond the ticket. The ones who understand the product, the customer, and the business.
The Current State: Adding More Roles Isn't the Solution
While I believe this task-taker approach is rather an inefficient and unproductive way of working, culturally, across the industry, it was and sometimes still is the norm. In fact, I know people who have worked their whole 20-30-40 year career this way.
To solve this problem, and a few others, especially larger companies started creating new roles:
- Project managers
- Product managers
- Program managers
- Technical program managers
I don't mean to underestimate what these professionals can do—in fact, I welcome having lots of product manpower. But I believe so much more efficiency could be found if engineers just thought outside of their ClickUp or Jira tickets. Often times, adding more and more roles are the wrong solution to the right problem.
The AI Catalyst: Why This Problem Is Now Critical
Now, with the rise of AI, this inefficiency is becoming more and more apparent. AI can execute, but it can't understand the product, the customer, or the business. It can't make smart trade-offs, it can't understand context and customer needs, and it can't align its work with business impact.
In fact, it makes it clearer than ever that writing code isn't the hard part. I can personally write lots of code, before or after AI, but especially now, lots of code, really really fast. However, this code will have very little value if it's not directly aligned with the product I'm building.
From Task Takers to Product Thinkers
The best engineering teams I’ve worked with always did more than just write code. They were involved in shaping what to build and why. They took ownership of outcomes—not just implementation.
Today, with AI writing code in seconds, the hard part isn’t building—it’s deciding what’s worth building. Engineers who can make smart trade-offs, who understand context and customer needs, and who align their work with business impact are the ones who will thrive.
What Makes a Great Engineer Today
Engineers tend to focus on output, rather than outcome. I want to express how bad I think this is. They often will say, look how complex or difficult it was to build this feature. Or how long it actually took. Well… ultimately, does it even matter if it didn’t hit the goals with product, whatever metrics are used to truly define success in that area?
Modern engineers need product fluency. Orders of magnitude more than the average engineer does today. They’re curious about the “why,” not just the “how.” They collaborate across functions, handle ambiguity, and help prioritize what matters most. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen products that were ridiculously over engineered, or sometimes under engineered purely because the engineer(s) and engineering leaders didn’t care to worry about the real outcome.
Yes, there will still be some space for task-based work—contracting, consulting, gig work. But inside product-driven companies, success will belong to those who can lead, not just follow instructions. AI can execute. It can’tdeeply understand and strategize growth around your users or your culture.
Conclusion
The era of the task taker is over—and maybe it should’ve ended a long time ago. The future belongs to product engineers. People who want to create, not just check boxes. People who solve the right problems, not just the technical ones.
Hiring is intrinsically broken in tech today, and while I can’t control what every company does, I can do my best to incoroporate ways of finding developers that care and are product minded when I hire for my teams.
Build with purpose. Think like a product engineer.