High Growth Engineer
Today, we have a special guest post from Ian Vanagas at Product for Engineers, one of the fastest-growing tech newsletters. Product for Engineers helps engineers build product-thinking skills and 10x their impact. It’s also written by folks at PostHog, an open-source and all-in-one suite of product and data tools.
Even if you don’t become a product engineer, learning how they work and think will help you build successful products, which you need for moving up in your career.
They care about building the right features, taking the initiative on impactful ideas, and building business context . They ruthlessly prioritize projects with high ROI.
Example: At PostHog, we ruthlessly prioritize business value. Sometimes, we deprioritize planned roadmap items to work on specific feature requests from a single large customer. When we switch gears, we focus on iterating in short loops to get customer feedback. Short feedback loops get us to the right solution—faster.
We’re ruthless about working on stuff that our users will see and care about. We are not ruthless about shaping and polishing our code into a radiant-cut gem of perfection. We have a “no refactoring for your first several months” rule, and you’ll remember that rule is there as you bounce around our code; there’s a lot that could be refactored.
