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.

The Engineers Who Already Cared About The Problem

Carlos Rosão, at the time Director of Engineering at NewStore, described their culture like it was obvious: "Engineers talk directly with customers. When something goes wrong in production, they're on the call." No product manager buffer. No requirements document telephone game. Just engineers understanding the problem firsthand.

Product leader Else van der Berg put it differently. She talked about the shift from "feature factories" to outcome-driven development. Teams obsessed with shipping features versus teams obsessed with solving problems. "The best engineers I've worked with don't ask 'what should I build?' They ask 'what problem are we solving?'"

On my side, I've lived this twice. At my first job at Viriciti, I worked end-to-end on multiple products. Requirements, discovery, design, implementation. All of it. In hindsight, I can see how having that bigger picture helped me move faster. The products were launched successfully because I cared about the whole problem, not just my slice of it.

Years later at Yoop Knows, I did it again. Customer interviews, pain point mapping, Figma mockups, usability testing, then implementation. No AI to help. The limiting factor was my time. Everything felt slow, almost waterfall, because I had to do it all by hand. With today's tools, that same process would move three times faster.

The Ownership Mindset Was Always There

Engineering manager Michele Sollecito reminded me that we should treat engineers as problem solvers, not factory workers. "When you treat a team as a factory producing features, you get factory output. When you treat them as problem solvers with ownership, everything changes."

Engineering leader Hugo Ferreira framed it as a question of organizational design: "What's the smallest unit that you have in your company? Some companies think it's the individual contributor. Other companies, the unit is the team." When companies see individuals as the unit, you get silos and handoffs. When the team is the unit, you get ownership.

Coach Jason Gorman went further. He argued that we'd systematically moved developers away from end users over decades. Layer upon layer of process between the person writing code and the person using it. "We created this distance and then wondered why software missed the mark."

The product engineer movement is really about removing barriers we built ourselves.

What AI Actually Changed for Product Engineers

Here's what I think happened.

The ideas and practices already existed. All the people I interviewed described variations of the same theme: engineers with broader context make better decisions.

But it was hard. Talking to customers took time. Understanding the business required investment. Learning adjacent skills meant stepping outside your comfort zone.

Else van der Berg captured the frustration: "At some point I was doing my CV and I was thinking, what did I really achieve? I built a lot of features. I pushed a lot of things out of the door, but did I contribute to revenue growth or stickiness of the product? I had no idea."

The organizations that did this were exceptions, not the rule.

AI collapsed the effort.

Now an engineer can prototype a user flow in hours instead of days. Can extract insights from customer research faster and more systematically. Can experiment with product ideas without waiting for design resources. AI dramatically reduced the friction that kept most engineers in their lane.

Looking Back

When I listen back to those recordings, I don't hear people predicting the future. I hear people frustrated with the present. Frustrated that engineering talent was being wasted on order-taking. Frustrated that smart people were reduced to ticket processors.

The product engineer movement isn't new. It always made sense to empower engineers this way. We just didn't have the tools to make it accessible beyond a few exceptional organizations.

Now we do. The people I interviewed years ago were already there. The tools finally caught up.

What This Opens Up

Shaun Thompson (Scrum inc.) put it simply: "What made the biggest impact on everybody was ensuring that they had a voice. Creating space for people to share their thoughts and their ideas and their creativity made us get better."

The product engineer movement was always about giving engineers that voice. AI just removed the excuse that it was too expensive or slow to let them use it.

If you're interested in learning more about how role are product and engineering are converging, you can check out the latest podcast episode of the Product Engineers Podcast