Product Engineer Track

For engineers on the team. Read Core first.

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How to Think

A product engineer ships, watches, and adjusts. "Shipped" isn't a state, it's a checkpoint. If you can't see whether the thing you built is being used, you didn't finish.

The smell is long branches, unflagged rollouts, dashboards you never open, and PRs the size of features. They feel productive. They aren't. The work is small PRs, behind flags, instrumented, watched. Mitigate before investigate. Symptoms before causes.

If you ever say "the spec said to build it," you've stopped being a product engineer.

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What to Read

Onboarding

• Engineering Onboarding — the most important page in this track, reread every six months
• Project Onboarding Template

Craft

• Engineering Mental Models
• Engineering Fundamentals
• Engineering Thinking
• Pull Requests
• Instrument Your Work

Operating

• Engineering Strategy & Vision (Strategy Template, Vision Template)
• Quarterly Plan (Template)

Growth

• Software Engineer Levels
• Engineering Competency Matrix
• Progression Framework

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Going Deeper

• Charity Majors — Deploys Are the ✨Wrong✨ Way to Change User Experience
• Martin Fowler — Feature Toggles
• Will Larson — Engineering strategy
• Gergely Orosz — The Pragmatic Engineer — engineering practice at scale
• Dan Luu — danluu.com — depth and rigor on systems

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Coming soon: Working with Design & PM. Shipping & Rollback Discipline.

Related: Product Manager, Product Designer