What Is a Product Engineer?
The title is as it sounds.
It's taking a software engineer and pulling them left. What that means is that they're heading into Product territory.
Not necessarily all the way (this depends on the organization), but sometimes it does.
There are cases when this means having a stakeholder describe what they need their product to be, and have the product engineer engage in a dialectic with the stakeholder about what that could look like - perhaps offering possibilities to spur on the product thinking.
It is similar to a classic agile refinement, but does skip the step of having a design fully fleshed-out.
The same essential elements are at play:
- a stakeholder with a vision or real, vetted requirements
- a product person with knowledge of UX, prototyping, and the need for rapid feedback and iteration
- the engineering knowledge to rapidly build the product
Sometimes there is more than one stakeholder. And sometimes there are more than one product engineers, perhaps with each engineer focusing on a different area of the product.
Both stakeholder and the product engineers are constantly angling for a deliverable: what is a minimal increment we can deliver? What did our lead or customer ask for? What can elicit the kind of feedback we need to get a 'yes' or a 'no'?
The result is a very lean, Agile-like process.