The rise of the Product Engineer

For years, we professionalized ourselves into silos.

PMs who "don't do technical." Engineers who "just want to code." Designers who throw mockups over the wall. Specialists everywhere, owners nowhere.

It worked—sort of. We compensated for fragmentation with process: standups, refinements, handoffs, tickets. Coordination became a job in itself.

Then AI crossed the tipping point.

Agentic coding tools now write, refactor, and ship code faster than most engineering teams can coordinate. The bottleneck isn't implementation anymore. It's knowing what to build and why.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: the people who refused to stay in their lane are suddenly 10x more effective. The PM who understood the codebase. The engineer who obsessed over customer problems. The polyglot who could move from strategy to SQL without a translator.

AI doesn't replace thinking. It amplifies it. If you understand the problem deeply, you move at unprecedented speed. If you don't, you just generate garbage faster.

This changes everything about how we build teams.

I see a near future where a Head of Product and five exceptional product engineers do what previously required a 50-person department. Not because they work harder—but because deep understanding plus AI leverage beats shallow specialization plus headcount.

The math is brutal. Specialists who can't cross boundaries become coordination overhead. PMs who only write tickets get outperformed by engineers who understand customers. Engineers who only execute get outperformed by AI.

What survives? People who own outcomes end-to-end. People who understand the why, the what, and enough of the how to move without waiting.

The product engineer isn't a new role. It's the role that always should have existed—before we sliced it into pieces and called it "professionalization."

Companies that embrace this shift will outmaneuver bloated competitors 10-to-1. The rest will wonder why their 50-person team gets outshipped by a startup of six.

Are you bold enough to embrace it?