As pointed out by a friend during a walk the other day. He's a Principal Software Engineer, and I was talking about my recent article on Product Engineering. His reaction to the concept:
That's what Software Engineering always was about
He's not wrong. A good software engineer always cared about the bigger picture, not just the immediate task. Agile was all about elevating the software engineers to being more actively involved in customer interactions and caring about the why at least as much as about the how.
We can talk about subtle differences between a traditional engineer and a product engineer, sure, and maybe with modern observability tooling, it's now possible for a single engineer to own more of the full feedback loop - from measuring how their features behave on the technical side (latency, reliability, etc.) to how the feature is being used by the clients.
Still, the best software engineers have always been excellent at product. Maybe embracing that new name encourages more of us to strive for that same excellence.
