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Many software engineers are happy to focus on the technical aspects of the job.
But for some, working on software products inevitably leads to strong opinions about those products: what they should look like, how they could better meet user needs, and how they can boost the bottom line of the business.
These engineers may not necessarily want to move into management, but they do want to help shape the ideas and requirements as a product engineer.
What is a product engineer and where did the job come from?
A product engineer is someone who combines software engineering skills with product development responsibilities. While a product engineer still spends much of their workday doing nuts and bolts software development, their focus ranges beyond code.
Rather than iterating full time on specific coding tasks, they take in the bigger picture, interacting with customers and end users to help figure out what features and capabilities would most benefit customers.
The phrase product engineer originally referred to a discipline within mechanical engineering that focused on the construction of physical products. While you’ll still see it used that way, it has been enthusiastically adopted in software development circles. (Sometimes if people are being more specific, they’ll use the phrases “product software engineer” or “product-minded engineer.”)
Their argument is that the high-level work of product management and the day-to-day grind of writing the code that underlies those products have drifted too far apart within many organizations. In small startups in particular, you want someone who understands both the codebase and customer needs.
Another factor towards the rise of product engineers is the increasingly widespread use of generative AI tools in software development. If these tools are able to take care of lower-level coding tasks, engineers are freed up to address business and customer needs.
Product engineer vs. software engineer
Product engineers, like software engineers, spend a lot of their time writing, testing, and shipping code. But they also spend more time talking to customers and users, researching competitive equivalents to whatever they’re working on, and, in some cases, building a roadmap for where their product is going. In turn, they spend less time optimizing specific parts of the codebase and don’t dive as deep into particular areas.
To put it succinctly: a software engineer owns (in the organizational sense of being ultimately responsible for) the code they write, while a product engineer owns the product they develop.
Product engineer vs. product manager
The difference between a product manager and product engineer is, to be simplistic, right there in the name. One is an engineer and the other is a manager.
That doesn’t mean product managers can’t have engineering expertise – many do – but working on code day-to-day is not part of their job description. Instead, product managers spend their time talking to users, analyzing the competition, writing up specs for engineers to implement, and managing the interaction among stakeholders within the company who have some claim on or interest in the project.
Because product managers don’t spend their time writing code, they can go far more in depth in all of these tasks, and approach them in a more deliberate and structured way. They are equally comfortable managing projects, laboring over Gantt charts, laying out and updating product roadmaps, and ensuring deadlines are met.
Product engineers also lay out roadmaps for their work, but they tend to be looser, allowing them to rapidly shoot from the hip and iterate over multiple prototype versions of an application themselves, or with a few collaborators. Product managers, by contrast, tend to take their time, coordinating with larger teams at a more deliberate pace. The results will be more polished when shared outside the group.
What types of companies have product engineer roles?
This combination of skills is uniquely attractive to small startup companies where staff resources are at a premium and people who can wear more than one hat are valued. Startups want engineers who are enthusiastic about the product, think in terms of the customer, and want to contribute in ways that immediately add value to the business, rather than one whose main obsessions are coding and building the perfectly technical solution.
They also are generally in a mode where they’re sprinting towards a minimum viable product, and the nimble, iterative methodology associated with product engineering is preferable to the more structured product development cycle overseen by a traditional product manager. Fission Labs has a great blog post about what product engineers can bring to startups in particular.
But that doesn’t mean that big companies can’t make use of a product engineer’s talents. At larger organizations, product engineers and product managers can share responsibilities. Product engineers in this environment still own the features they’re working on, and make decisions about products that software engineers would not; but they can rely on the product manager for support and business contex. For more on this, check out the Accredian product management blog on how product engineers and product managers can complement each other’s work.
Product engineer roles and responsibilities
If you’re working as a product engineer, you will likely:
- Help develop a roadmap for new features and products
- Communicate with product managers, stakeholders, and customers to understand what they need
- Perform market research to generate new product ideas and understanding the competitive landscape
- Make design decisions based on that input and on your own instincts
- Write code to implement those design decisions, alone or in collaboration with software engineers
- Iterate on that code to fix bugs, improve the product, and perhaps pivot it to new uses as it matures
Product engineer skills
A product engineering job straddles the worlds of engineering and product management, and it requires two different types of skills:
Hard skills. As a product software engineer, you will be writing code, so you’ll need to be conversant in whatever tech stack your organization uses. While you won’t need to be the most hardcore programmer on the team and you’ll be able to rely on software engineers for help in the final polished product, you’ll need to be comfortable with technology and with writing code on your own as you iterate. In fact, you should be a savvy user of automated tools that help you produce better code, whether its DevOps pipelines and automated unit tests, or AI coding assistants that can help you make you more productive.
Soft skills. While programming ability are table stakes for this job, the differentiator qualities that can make you a great product engineer lie elsewhere. Can you think about apps and features not just as a technologist, but as a user, customer, and business leader? Can you research and understand the overall business context in which your application operates? Are you comfortable talking with other people, gathering and synthesizing their input, and coming to a consensus on what features they might want would look like?
The ability to combine these two buckets is a rarer talent than you might think. But someone who is capable of talking tech to engineers and talking business to everyone else has a bright professional future ahead of them.
Product engineer salary expectations
Product engineer (specifically in the world of software engineering) is still an emerging job category. The only country where Glassdoor has enough data to estimate average compensation product engineers is the United States: their pay is around $165,000, with around $125,000 of that being base salary and the rest additional pay in the form of bonuses, stock grants, and so on. That average is part of a typical range that can go from $135,000 on the lower end to $204,000 on the high end.
One wrinkle is that, as hopefully should be clear from this article, there’s no such thing as an entry-level product engineer: most product engineers would be higher up on the ladder and in their mid-career, trending up from lead developers into to those on the lower end of the Staff+ spectrum of roles, and their pay will reflect that.
It’s a challenging job – and also a rewarding one, and we wish you luck as you pursue it.
