The Product-Minded Engineer: The importance of good errors and warnings

Before we start: I’m hiring!

The Pragmatic Engineer is not a typical publication, and so this is also not a typical role. I’m looking for someone to help research and compile Tuesday deepdives like the one on Cursor, on Claude Code, on Stripe, and many others. This position will include directly talking with engineers at interesting companies, researching both public details and details made exclusively available to us, and compiling what we learned into detailed reports.

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One trend in tech is that more startups are hiring for “product engineers” or “product-minded engineers”, who can implement products and also come up with strong product and feature ideas, then build them. This trend of engineers’ involvement from the ideas stage through to shipping looks set to accelerate with AI tools generating ever more code.

My recent analysis of what happens when AI writes almost all the code mentioned that nimble startups were already recruiting “product engineers” who can create their own work, and act as blends of mini-product manager and software engineer. I said this indicates that being more product-minded could become a baseline at startups because it’s increasingly important to specify what an AI tool should build.

But how do you get better at being a product engineer?

Obviously, pairing with a product manager, staying close to the business, and finding a mentor who’s a great product engineer are strong options. But if these aren’t all available in your workplace, there’s now a book dedicated to the topic.

Entitled “The Product-Minded Engineer”, it’s written by former software engineer and current product manager, Drew Hoskins, and published by O’Reilly:

A few years ago, I published an article named “The Product-Minded Software Engineer” which offers tips for software engineers to grow their “product muscle”, and it’s timely that a fellow engineer has invested in writing a guide about this increasingly pertinent subject.

After hearing Drew was working on his book, I got in touch, reviewed a draft version, and asked if he’d consider sharing an excerpt in this newsletter. Graciously,