Product has always been the bottleneck, it’s just clearer now
If you’ve been doing engineering in a big enough company for a while now, you are probably aware of the process most companies with a substantial number of people use. Engineers wait for the go ahead to build some product that management has identified to solve a market gap. Now, in most big enough teams, what happens is that management or product identify market gaps, and there’s a lot of ideation that goes on around what the business should build. And this ideation, if you’re doing it right, takes a lot of time and a lot of effort to get the right product built.
But oops, there’s AI now. This is how I think it is going to affect things. Previously, the bottleneck was engineering time; time used to plan, time used to execute. That can be drastically cut down by AI. So execution time reduces. You’re accomplishing tasks of high complexity in less time if you have a clear engineering plan. Earlier, companies hired a lot of engineers because execution is hard and it takes time. You need hands on deck, you need things done in a specific amount of time. But now we have the ability to spin up agents to do the majority of these things, and they’re getting pretty darn good. The regular flow of work was this: when engineering is working on stuff, product can also ideate during this time. So there’s this balance of time spread across. There’s hardly a case where there’s no work to be done, or at least it wasn’t so clear back then when there was a glaring lack of competence in product. Now, if you don’t have the right amount of talent in product as a company, you’re cooked. And engineers in such companies are cooked as well.
If you’re in a company that’s very bureaucratic, where your processes are similar to what I just described — where people tell you what to do — and you’re doing them fast at a record rate because you have agents, then you’re going to be idle. It’s going to come to a case where you’re going to ship faster than product has ideas to develop, or product can identify market gaps and ship good enough products that actually make money. If you hit that case, you’re going to have more free time. And companies view free time as: we don’t need you. Also, you’re going to ship stuff that hasn’t been thought about properly, and it’s not going to do well in the market. The company won’t make money, and they still have to pay you. And then the company is going to ask: why are we doing this?
If you’re in a company where there’s a bridge between engineers and the people responsible for ideation and exploring market gaps, and there’s huge friction in getting ideas up to management or whoever is responsible for making the final call, you’re in danger. If product becomes the bottleneck, you are going to suffer as an engineer.
If you find yourself in a company like that, where it’s difficult to push things forward or contribute to what gets built, I think you need to self evaluate and make the best decision for yourself. What I think companies should do is break down that bridge completely. That bridge has to be removed. You need engineers to be closer to ideation. There needs to be a tight feedback loop between the people responsible for ideation and the people building. That’s the only way to survive, because if you don’t do that, you’re going to have more people than work. And when you have more people than work, the business will lose and so will everyone involved. Companies now have to invest more in product because execution is cheap when you just need a steerer. The era where product was responsible for getting engineers to do some stuff within a specific timeline 70% of the time & not put 99% of their effort in thinking and solving actual business problems is dead.
TLDR; Companies need to start hiring product talent with the same amount of scrutiny that they used to hire for engineering, because that will make or break the company.