You’re a product engineer. What are the essential tools you need to succeed?

Unlike optional framework or language expertise, you have to be an expert in Git to be effective as a product engineer. This is because workflow is very important when it comes to working as a team. Complex workflows will require more git knowledge to be productive. But it benefits everyone. Skipping on Git knowledge will have long term consequences and is not worth it, considering a typical Git course material is 3-6 hours long, bringing you from your current level to an expert.

I would go as far as saying you shouldn't consider yourself an engineer in software development if you're not familiar with Git and know how to clone and commit to a repository and resolve merge conflicts.

A good product engineer must have other software experience outside of the company and their area of expertise. They need to be an experienced user, more than a product engineer. This is where most product engineers fall short. They either worked at the same company for 20 years working on the same product, or went through a UX bootcamp considering themselves an expert afterwards. In reality, one needs to install and use 10000 different applications to understand common interaction patterns and efficiencies. Mouse movement optimization, hotkeys, reducing user wait time, not blocking the user, and many more. A boring but functional UI is 100x better than the one that looks great but is practically unusable.

My experience is that many engineers think about UX/UI from a technical perspective and prematurely optimise code before figuring out the best user flow. Ideally, you don't even care about code before you haven't figured out what a user actually needs. Low-code and no-code tools come in handy here because they help you focus on essential interactions rather than jumping into technical solutions.

I've learned that expectation management plays an important role when building products that users want. Often, people unfamiliar with lean principles expect a product or feature to work out of the box, and if it doesn't, that means the idea is bad. Properly educating people on the process of iterating on an idea or prototype helps them understand that product development is an ongoing initiative that requires regular, constructive feedback from all stakeholders.

The best way to learn is to attempt to create something, especially if you are striving to bring your creation to a world-class level.

One of the most common cases in development is disparate, sometimes conflicting requirements and frequently changing customer priorities. During implementation, more and more new requirements begin to be added to a particular set of tasks, which often go directly to the developers. As a result, engineers don't know where to go or what to work on. The main reason for this situation is that they do not see the complete picture of the project: what main problem the final product should solve, who its users are, and so on. A product engineer sees a holistic picture of the project he is working on, can evaluate the feasibility of a particular functionality, generate ideas, and present them to the team.