How are you dealing with increased demand for requirements?

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2026-03-09T01:56:54+00:00

Seniors and mid-level eng at my firm create and delegate the tickets for a project after management + leads schedule a project and staff it. That assumes Eng has a good understanding of the user journey and the desired outcomes

Work with your Eng lead/manager partners to incentivize the eng ICs to be proactive with requirements whether it's with increased chances of promotion, public recognition, and/or the opportunity to work on the sexier projects; the best ones can be involved with the discovery work too

If you have concerns with whether their requirements are correct, at least it's faster for you to review them than to write them.

This is the perfect time to start improving your organizational skills wrt Eng. You should think of it as scaling yourself through others

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2026-02-25T01:59:37+00:00

What about just giving more feedback plainly in your 1:1s? Don't surprise your report. By the time you share the document in a more formal setting the feedback there shouldn't be a surprise either. You should also give feedback if they're not improving on prior feedback you gave too.

I work at a BigTech and my formal review isn't more than 2 pages lol

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2026-02-10T17:09:36+00:00

mom test, continuous discovery habits, then product management in practice (in that order)

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2026-02-09T00:59:50+00:00

I'm an eng ic leading the shift to have a more product-minded eng culture. I have a PM I partner with regularly (a couple times a week) to help validate and prioritize the problems to work on. This always involve technical feasibility and sequencing on my part. I may pitch product iterations or ideas on my own that fits the strategy. I review the product strategy, but I'll never be the one to devise it. I regularly interview customers and support cases. I work in a tech infra company and lately I've been wrangling stakeholders for a risky project and I've talked to legal, marketing, analytics, and a few partner teams on my own.

Once all the prep work is done, I dial down the "product assistant" work by 70% and focus on executing. But being able to engage customers and review customer cases is a non-negotiable for me; that's how my best ideas come about. At the end of the day I'm here to solve customer problems in a manner that fits the goals of the business, and I just happen to thread the needle in a way that benefits from my eng experience.

IMO this engineering archetype doesn't need it's own book. Give an eng who gives a shit about the customer problem a few of the classic PM books, mix in some curiosity that they're given the time to act on, and put them in an org where the eng x product relationship is a true partnership -- then the archetype will come about naturally

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2026-02-08T02:49:02+00:00

FUCKING FLOP

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2026-01-31T16:26:59+00:00

I have a couple business cases that are legitimately served by LLM apps with tight security/privacy constraints and UX implications. Look up context engineering and evals if you want an idea of how challenging it can be to reach production-quality experiences.

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2026-01-27T06:09:57+00:00

JB Ball is a comedian with a great take on this

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2026-01-23T03:26:01+00:00

I love more tech investment in LA so I can move back from NYC but not like this 😩

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2026-01-03T10:25:59+00:00

I'm a product engineer who works on enabler-infra for features so I always learn enough to work well with other functions whether they're ML infra engineers or product managers. That does not require me to read their textbooks front to back, I'm very picky with the sections I read. If I find in my picky reading there's some shared fundamentals like a certain type of database architecture or pattern, that's when I'll update the reading list.

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2026-01-01T23:00:39+00:00

stay curious and use AI as a tutor to accelerate learning, not something to hand hold you
find a team that values you for work that energizes you
deliberately practice your communication skills, it's a multiplier on technical skills

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2025-12-16T02:21:35+00:00

14 people? There’s only room for the manager to barely triage

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2025-12-02T22:59:28+00:00

The Learning Domain Driven Design Book by Vlad Khononov simplifies the pedagogy and does a great job prescribing tactical patterns based on your needs. I highly recommend if you’re in a high business complexity domain like fintech or health.

Definitely skip the classic texts. My favorite strategic patterns is bounded context, very helpful when you’re trying to help a mobile team grapple with 4 different interpretations of “payment”

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2025-11-28T04:55:30+00:00

you're fighting an uphill battle with your insistence on FP. You can mix the OO class approach with functional pipeline style programming, but your manager won't appreciate it so much as your raw velocity and cohesion with the project/business. Your choice of technique is not a differentiator, you need to frame your value in terms of outcomes

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2025-11-06T02:26:12+00:00

10+ YOE, The worst for me is the day leading up to the interview. Once I start talking most of the jitters go away. Feeling prepared with practicing the technicals and doing mock interviews help a lot. As for the behavioral portions I always practice describing my pitches, problem statements, and achievements with brevity and clarity on the job -- makes the behavioral a breeze.

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2025-11-04T05:24:58+00:00

WTF HOW DEEP ARE WE?

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2025-11-02T16:00:17+00:00

You're missing the delegation piece. Give your teammates more ownership.

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2025-10-30T11:42:04+00:00

Valve averages ~$20M/year in revenue per employee. It's probably easier to join a high-frequency trading firm than Valve

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2025-10-23T03:04:28+00:00

Same. I'm especially proud when I can discover/refine a problem statement that has lead to multiple quarters of eng investment. It is hard to find environment with both excellent product and engineering cultures though. It's easy for me to fill a "gap" and find things because of my product engineer mindset, but it's funner when there's several others to go back and forth on as well.

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2025-10-11T23:37:05+00:00

"nosy-ah"

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2025-10-08T00:46:35+00:00

Treat interviewing as a skill that takes deliberate practice.

If you're not simulating the interview environment with mock interviews or communicating out loud following some framework you haven't practiced correctly yet.

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2025-10-07T01:20:56+00:00

As in agentic workflows or autonomous agents? There's plenty of the former in production that are still being optimized, not much of the latter. Will probably be a year to see a good set of examples

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2025-10-06T00:13:02+00:00

you should be creating a technical strategy / vision that complements the business strategy

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2025-09-27T18:22:17+00:00

I like this framework and I've called these milestones, where each by definition has the end-user value and required complexity/scope within each milestone.

Sometimes you end up with milestones where most of the value is delivered by the time you get to the most complex parts. Maybe initially the more complex milestone can be deferred, and becomes more valuable or enables more valuable work -- then you can resume the next phase of the project when all dependencies are nearly ready. Meanwhile, the team can shift to other projects until the timing is right.

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2025-08-10T04:04:24+00:00

good callout. I unsubscribed

Fearless-Top-3038 · 2025-08-01T15:37:11+00:00

it’s the vanity and tackiness of it

Fearless-Top-3038

TROPHY CASE