Everyone's talking about "product engineers" like we just invented them.

Scroll LinkedIn for five minutes and you'll see breathless posts about how AI is finally enabling engineers to do product work. How the walls between product and engineering are finally crumbling. How this convergence is revolutionary (and I'm guilty of that too).

This isn't even a new idea in writing. Gergely Orosz described product-minded engineers years ago. Marty Cagan has been advocating for empowered teams for over a decade.

I have a confession: I recorded a series of conversations for my podcast Invisible Algorithms years ago, before ChatGPT existed, before AI coding assistants were a thing. I was talking about empowering software engineers. And every single guest was already describing some aspects of what we now call product engineering.

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