Become an Epic Product Engineer

If you only get asked about feasibility, this episode is for you. Kent talks with Sam Julien - Director of Product at CopilotKit, author of Agentic GraphRAG - about moving past ticket-taking, collaborative product-engineering dialogue, and frameworks that help you push back with vocabulary. They cover leverage / neutral / overhead triage, Kagan's four big risks, communicating intent with AI agents, and why engineers need product models even when they have a PM. (00:00) - Meet Sam Julien (01:26) - Dev to DevRel to product (03:37) - Product, design, and engineering overlap (06:00) - Durable skills as agents write code (12:01) - Get closer to customers (15:34) - Building a product-minded engineering team (18:46) - When technical work was the whole job (25:28) - Talk through the problem first (33:26) - Sales-driven development and gatekeeping (36:26) - Beyond feasibility (39:35) - LNO, RICE, and friends (42:42) - Continuous discovery and agents (46:44) - Communicating intent to AI (51:27) - Homework: triage your…

If you ship features and never hear what users actually said, this episode is for you. Kent talks with Ben Vinegar - co-founder of Modem, formerly founding engineer and VPE at Sentry - about aggregating feedback, eliminating adoption barriers, and keeping human judgment in the loop as AI speeds up shipping. They cover FreshBooks-era product engineering, Modem's approach to capturing feedback across Slack, Discord, GitHub, and support tools, and why five real conversations beat a median LLM opinion. (00:00) - Meet Ben Vinegar (01:29) - Career startup guy (03:48) - What Modem is for (06:59) - Building products for builders (12:58) - Aggregating feedback at scale (15:26) - FreshBooks and early product loops (21:34) - Onboarding and getting users unstuck (25:06) - Emerging technology at Sentry (27:59) - Buy a laundromat - go deep on users (33:56) - Support culture and intentionality (39:35) - Human connection in the feedback loop (42:27) - Hunk and accelerating taste with AI (45:12) - Human judgment vs median…

If your backlog is full of tickets and zero customer contact, this episode is for you. Kent talks with Teresa Torres - product discovery coach, author of Continuous Discovery Habits, and host of Just Now Possible - about why engineers belong in discovery, what "just now possible" really means, and how curiosity beats solution advocacy. They cover opportunity solution trees, confirmation bias in decision-making, the Mom Test trap of pitching your solution, and homework that starts with one real conversation (or observing one). (00:00) - Meet Teresa Torres (02:03) - Just now possible (04:14) - Why coding agents are not enough (08:07) - Engineers in the data model conversation (15:10) - Continuous discovery habits (19:01) - Prove the null hypothesis (21:22) - Where engineers should show up more (24:06) - Solving your own problem (27:27) - AI unlocks software for one (30:04) - The Mom Test trap (33:26) - Opportunity solution trees (39:19) - Confirmation bias vs status quo (42:07) - Informed opinion vs preference…

If you still build for an audience of one and get defensive when users "use it wrong," this episode is for you. Kent talks with Mark Techson - staff developer relations engineer on Angular at Google - about empathy as a career differentiator, listening without defense, and why knowing what to build still beats vibe-coding forever. They cover internal tools as real products, a fitness-app failure that forced better questions, Google Developer Experts as a feedback loop, durable expertise in the AI era, and why attention is the scarce resource when anyone can ship. Mark Techson (legal name Mark Thompson) has spent about twenty years building software - teaching, senior engineering roles, a fitness startup, American Express fraud tooling, healthcare exchange apps, and now staff DevRel on Angular at Google. The views in this episode are his own; he notes he works for a major frontier-model provider. The through-line is empathy. Mark's number-one product-engineering skill is putting yourself in the end user's…

If execution got cheap and you still wait for someone to tell you what to build, this episode is for you. Kent talks with Joyce Er about five years owning features on VS Code, the jump to product at Cerebras, and why trust is the metric that tells you the work is working. They cover daily stand-ups that roast your feature in public, friction logs as taste practice, dogfooding when you cannot be the user, qualifying customers instead of taking every check, and why a sales book belongs on a product engineer's shelf. (00:00) - Meet Joyce Er (01:18) - A dinner-plate AI chip (02:47) - Engineering as we knew it shrunk (04:38) - Ownership on the VS Code team (07:33) - Why ownership matters more with AI (10:23) - Keep a friction log (12:18) - Judgment from lived experience (15:33) - Invalidate old priors (17:41) - VS Code's daily stand-up roast (20:35) - When you cannot dogfood (22:52) - Getting partner teams to help (29:30) - Curiosity and time-boxing AI (32:20) - Selling inference to coding tools (34:00) - Qualify…

If you ship a feature and never click through it yourself, this episode is for you. Kent talks with Rita Kozlov, VP of Product for Cloudflare's developer platform, about the line between product managers and product engineers, why ownership still matters when prototypes look real, and how far upstream an engineer should insert themselves. They cover holding the pager vs throwing away a prototype, sitting in customer calls until someone will not click the button, primitives vs paved paths, and what to do when your PM is running a feature factory. (00:00) - Meet Rita Kozlov (01:36) - Engineering taste in a PM role (04:05) - Where PM and product engineer blur (07:53) - You are not holding the pager (09:48) - What AI changed on both sides (13:40) - Sit in the user's seat (17:04) - The art of the possible (18:53) - Trade-offs and why not both (23:22) - Primitives vs paved cow paths (26:43) - Insert yourself upstream (29:40) - When the PM is a feature factory (33:17) - Deep-stack work still reaches users (37:58) -…

If you are merging beautiful AI PRs without being able to say why the change exists, this episode is for you. Kent talks with Erin Fox about treating every feature like a new product, asking why before you write code, and rebuilding the trust contract that agents quietly broke. They cover circling back to metrics, using community Slack as a feedback loop, telling a stakeholder story that is not just a migration estimate, and going slower with agents so they do not rewrite your patterns. (00:00) - Meet Erin Fox (01:40) - A new feature is a new product (05:03) - Finding the why before you build (07:36) - AI PRs broke the trust contract (10:57) - Metrics, research, and circling back (14:25) - Community Slack as a feedback loop (16:17) - Tell the story stakeholders can hear (20:49) - Communications skills as an engineering edge (24:12) - Ask your boss their goals (27:22) - Go slower with your agents (37:50) - Homework: ask why on every PR Erin Fox is a full-stack engineer who has shipped a React Native MLS…

If shipping got cheap and you are still not sure you are building the right thing, this episode is for you. Kent talks with Peppe Silletti, independent product engineer and host of The Product Engineers Podcast, about why customer discovery still comes first when AI can write the code in a day. They cover startup vs scale-up trade-offs, raising the MVP baseline without adding noise, how PostHog treats product engineers vs product managers, and the durable skills that stay valuable when agents take more of the implementation. (00:00) - Meet Peppe Silletti (01:13) - Startup exploration vs scale-up bottlenecks (04:04) - Trade-offs before you paint yourself into a corner (06:07) - AI raises the MVP baseline (09:47) - Do not add so much that the data gets noisy (11:13) - AI is a tool, not a silver bullet (13:47) - Product engineers are not just managers (16:06) - How you know you built too much (18:49) - Prioritizing after product-market fit (24:30) - PM as compass, engineer as slice owner (27:08) - What Peppe…

If you walk into cross-team asks with a prescription instead of curiosity, this episode is for you. Kent talks with Shaundai Person about privacy UX at Netflix, the micro-sales skills she brought from a decade in sales, and why AI should accelerate good engineering judgment instead of replacing it. They cover putting yourself in the user's seat before you push back, selling the conversation instead of the ticket, what happens when agents fill a repo with band-aids, and homework that gets you out of your usual domain: try a CSS animation course without AI. (00:00) - Meet Shaundai Person (00:51) - Privacy and consent at Netflix (04:30) - What privacy engineering actually involves (08:38) - Push back with user scenarios (11:10) - UX so intuitive a toddler can use it (13:43) - Working through technical constraints (18:45) - Micro-sales from a sales career (22:32) - Curiosity is not manipulation (25:47) - AI's impact on software engineering (29:42) - Agent band-aids and architecture gaps (35:40) - New criteria…

If you are building something people want but still cannot grow it, this episode is for you. Kent talks with Michael Grinich, founder of WorkOS, about cold-emailing product managers, closing the feedback loop with real users, and why live demos beat polished decks. They cover the missing step after "make something people want," how durable problem spaces survive market shifts (including auth for agents), and why storytelling is part of the product. (00:00) - Meet Michael Grinich (02:00) - Choosing the enterprise-ready niche (04:31) - Building for problems that are not yours (06:34) - Cold-emailing PMs who already shipped enterprise (10:44) - Questions that get past compliments (12:52) - Patience and durable problem spaces (15:57) - Beyond make something people want (20:25) - Auth for agents and MCP (23:57) - Talk to users, not just customers (28:42) - Live demos as tech marketing (31:39) - Test your story like Comedy Cellar material (39:10) - Monkey see, monkey do and Julia Child (43:03) - Homework: build…

If you ship features before you can explain the process, this episode is for you. Kent talks with Ronan Berder about building consumer products at Nike, Hilton, and Burberry scale in China, why engineers need to leave the IDE, and why a process you have not written down is not a process. They cover aligning teams on product vision, benchmarking competitors before you invent, design boundaries that unlock creativity, consulting failures from expectation gaps, and the homework that sounds too simple: write down what you are struggling with. (00:00) - Meet Ronan Berder (01:53) - Shipping at China consumer scale (03:42) - Partner vs vendor: strategy before build (09:02) - Aligning engineers on product vision (15:56) - Benchmark competitors before you invent (17:35) - Design systems, boundaries, and process (22:42) - If it is not written down, you do not have a process (28:40) - Process scale: five people vs 160 (33:21) - Horizontal skills beyond the IDE (34:15) - Abstraction layers in the business (39:44) -…

If you build internal tools, AI enablement, or platform work, this episode is for you. Kent talks with Ben Ilegbodu about treating developers as customers, measuring success without a checkout funnel, and the durable skills that still matter when agents write more of the code. They cover agentic workflows and skills at Netflix, closing the agent loop for TV UI development, verification and harness engineering, and why deciding what to build beats shipping three times more features. (00:00) - Meet Ben Ilegbodu (01:06) - From React speaking to Netflix AI enablement (02:56) - Training engineers for agentic workflows (04:17) - Skills, context, and insulating teams from churn (08:41) - Product engineering for internal tools (10:06) - How to measure success without a checkout funnel (12:07) - Closing the agent loop for TV UI (18:34) - Durable skills: what to build, specs, verification (23:45) - Harness builders and agent experience (26:33) - Agent-to-agent PR review (28:21) - Intent docs and harness engineering…

Kent talks with Robert C. Martin - Uncle Bob - about what AI agents change, what they do not change, and why software architecture, design sense, and customer empathy still matter. They cover why engineers may need to "walk away from the code" while still caring about structure, how agents can be guided with quality tools, why beginners still need to learn the material agents manipulate, and what product engineering looks like when implementation gets cheaper. (00:00) - Meet Robert C. Martin (02:53) - What has changed and what has not (05:41) - The rising abstraction line (08:00) - Walking away from the code (11:15) - Agents and larger systems (14:16) - Clean code when agents write code (20:09) - Design sense and agent judgment (22:36) - Why beginners still need code (34:57) - What product engineering means (41:18) - Homework: try SwarmForge Robert C. Martin has watched software move through layers of abstraction for decades: binary, assembly, high-level languages, frameworks, and now AI agents. In this…

Kent talks with Annie Sexton, developer educator at ngrok, about the durable skills engineers need as AI changes the shape of software work. They cover how to teach complex technical ideas without assuming too much, why curiosity keeps engineers from becoming button pushers, how pacing and storytelling make educational content work, and why UX and product judgment are becoming harder to ignore. (00:00) - Meet Annie Sexton (02:15) - Teaching for the mid-level developer (05:48) - Jobs to be done for technical education (08:19) - Which fundamentals still matter with AI? (12:13) - Tricking people into learning (18:27) - Measuring educational content (23:13) - Pacing, hooks, and retention (30:12) - Education as trust-building (35:23) - Curiosity and engineering joy in the AI era (40:11) - UX as a differentiator (43:40) - Homework: make users awesome and audit a product Annie Sexton is a developer educator, software engineer, and technical video creator whose work has focused on making difficult infrastructure and…

Kent talks with Michael Shimeles - Rasmic - about building products in the AI era without losing the engineering judgment that makes software useful. They cover AI consulting, why clients often ask for the wrong thing, how to push conversations back to the real problem, why simplicity is a product advantage, and why developers are more valuable when they combine technical skill with taste, domain knowledge, and user empathy. (00:00) - Meet Michael Shimeles (01:16) - Product studios and AI consulting (04:35) - Training teams and building custom agents (07:37) - Uncovering the real problem (12:33) - Questions that cut through AI hype (16:47) - Do it the hard way first (19:01) - Finding ideas in products you use (21:03) - Taste, quality, and care (24:10) - Simplicity beyond design (28:04) - Domain knowledge and feedback (31:11) - Developers are expected to own more (35:35) - Do not fall in love with the solution (39:14) - Homework: read an old engineering book Michael Shimeles is a full-stack engineer, DevX…

Kent talks with Lucas Wargha, engineering manager at FamilySearch, about turning software engineers into product engineers: understanding mission and business outcomes, talking to real users across cultures, and stopping the assembly line of JIRA handoffs. They cover customer personas at global scale, the Gmail password-loading story as product-engineering thinking, owning epics end-to-end, creators vs consumers, and a hopeful take on historic days in our industry. (00:00) - Introduction to Product Engineering (02:12) - FamilySearch and product outcomes (07:36) - Customer personas at global scale (12:07) - Know your customer better than your code (15:01) - Product engineer vs product manager (17:33) - Turning engineers into product engineers (22:38) - The Gmail password-loading story (27:01) - Stopping the JIRA assembly line (31:19) - Prioritizing customer needs (42:28) - Homework: talk to three users Lucas leads engineers building FamilySearch Memories - tools for photos, audio, and stories that help people…

Kent talks with Ruben Casas about building products again in the AI-agent era: why experienced engineers can now stay close to customers and code, how demos turn vague ideas into something people can react to, and why product judgment matters more as implementation gets cheaper. They cover Postman, MCP, agent-driven UI, prototypes, early user feedback, feature product-market fit, and the engineering guardrails that help teams ship quickly without turning the product into a pile of disconnected features. (00:00) - Introduction to Product Engineering (00:48) - Ruben Casas and Postman (07:36) - Building products again in the AI era (19:38) - Finding customer pain points (22:32) - Demos and prototypes (28:53) - Getting people to care about your ideas (31:41) - Prioritizing product problems (41:25) - Homework: build a prototype demo Ruben brings a practical perspective from building developer tooling, platform work, and AI-agent products at Postman. The conversation starts with a shift many experienced engineers…

Kent talks with Sean Roberts, engineer at PhotoShelter, about product engineering shaped by agency work and small teams: being the technical person in sales conversations early, planning with product judgment, and knowing when to speak up (and when to listen). They discuss why implementation skill still matters in the AI era, how to avoid "vibes-only" product calls, budgeting and sequencing work with business context, and why striking up real conversations (with customers or anyone) is a trainable muscle. (00:00) - Introduction to Product Engineering (02:11) - Agency work and customer conversations (08:47) - The technical person in the room (16:54) - Determining business goals (26:48) - Planning and the dark forest (35:10) - Relationships and positive feedback (40:21) - Homework: talk to someone new Sean's path is a familiar pattern for this season: years of agency and startup work where engineers sit close to customers, budgets are real, and the person writing code is often in the room when the problem gets…

Kent talks with Grady Booch about what software engineering still means in the age of AI agents, why implementation is only one part of the work, and why human judgment remains central to building durable systems. They discuss software architecture, the limits of large language models, computable minds, product engineering across different risk and complexity levels, and the kind of curiosity that helps engineers grow beyond a narrow slice of the field. (00:00) - Introduction to Product Engineering (01:00) - Grady Booch background (06:47) - The Last Software Engineer (09:00) - Will the software industry end? (10:04) - Consciousness and the computable mind (20:13) - What is software engineering? (27:45) - Software architecture and agents (35:30) - The ceiling for LLMs on implementation (39:33) - Durable skills and human judgment (41:39) - Curiosity beyond your domain (45:47) - Homework: read foreign source code Grady brings a rare long-view perspective to the AI and software engineering conversation: early…

Kent talks with Swizec Teller about product engineering for software that serves real businesses and non-developer users: how to learn a domain you did not grow up in, how to spot hidden friction by watching people work, and why the best product work focuses on outcomes, not engineering puzzles. They talk through biotech, internal tooling, habits users build around buggy software, feature placement, success metrics, and how to widen the pit of success for people who are just trying to do their jobs. (00:00) - Intro (01:04) - Swizec's path from startups to biotech (02:18) - Learning a domain you didn't grow up in (05:14) - Widening the pit of success (09:46) - Introducing workflow changes without friction (12:11) - Feature flags and early feedback loops (16:11) - How to find real user needs (20:02) - What support tickets tell you about users (22:55) - Reading friction as a product signal (24:51) - Automation and what it changes for users (26:58) - Where to place new capabilities (29:26) - Breaking big ideas…

Kent talks with Jack Ryan, Principal Engineer at Intercom, about product engineering at scale: why implementation is only part of the job, how to broaden what you measure as success beyond shipping tickets, and why customer feedback is an input, not a product roadmap. They cover startup lessons from property tech, metrics vs. conversation, AI-era decision-making, performance trade-offs, PM/engineering overlap, and practical ways engineers can tighten feedback loops without outsourcing judgment to users. Jack brings a useful split perspective: early UK proptech startup experience where engineering success and company success were basically the same thing, followed by years of technical leadership at Intercom without people management. That combination shows up throughout the episode in how he talks about responsibility, ambiguity, and what still matters when agents can generate more code faster. A big theme is reframing success. Instead of celebrating "I shipped the ticket on time," Jack argues product…

Kent talks with Rhys Sullivan about building Executor and thinking like a product engineer in the AI-agent era: how to design the right primitives, why agent experience is becoming its own product surface, and how to keep quality high when shipping has never been easier. They cover MCP, code mode, approvals, workspace scoping, docs and APIs as user experience, and why slowing down can still be the right move even when agents make speed feel free. Rhys has an unusually current perspective on product engineering because he is working right at the edge of the agent tooling shift. The conversation starts with his recent work on Vercel Domains and then moves into Executor, where the challenge is no longer just implementing integrations, but choosing the abstractions that make a system composable, safe, and pleasant to use over time. What makes the episode strong is how often it comes back to product judgment instead of novelty. Rhys and Kent talk about finding the right primitives, observing how other products…

Kent talks with Alex Hillman of Stacking the Bricks about customer research, product fit, and the kind of product engineering that starts before implementation: understanding who you are serving, what they already believe, and how to make people feel understood instead of sold to. They cover audience selection, observational research, helping in public, aligning your work with customer and business priorities, and why AI makes human judgment, trust, and synthesis more important rather than less. Alex brings a product and marketing lens that fits this season perfectly: great products do not just solve technical problems, they help the right people recognize that you understand their world. The conversation starts with finding an audience and quickly turns into a practical way to build product sense inside a company: learn how customers describe themselves, observe where they gather, listen for the language they use, and speak from their priorities instead of your own taste. The second half gets into Sales…

Kent talks with Julius Marminge about building T3 Code in the agent-orchestrator wave: why speed still matters, why fast shipping does not mean shipping every possible feature, and how product judgment becomes more important as parallel AI workflows make implementation cheap. They dig into dogfooding, core-product trade-offs, monetization pressure, customization vs defaults, and how to keep agent-built software maintainable over time. Julius is building right in the middle of one of the fastest-moving product categories in software, and that gives this episode a useful tension: everything feels possible, but that does not mean everything belongs in the product. The conversation covers the shift from one-agent-at-a-time coding to orchestration, why T3 Code focuses so much on a fast app layer, and how Julius thinks about what should live in the core product versus forks, plugins, or future work. The deeper lesson is about judgment under speed. Julius and Kent keep returning to the same idea from different…

Kent talks with Jamon Holmgren about product engineering from a long-running consultancy lens: how working with clients, stakeholders, and non-technical users sharpens your product sense, and why those skills matter even more as implementation gets cheaper with AI. They cover React Native, consulting, game design, stakeholder failures, feedback loops, and what software builders need to keep learning as the job shifts up the stack. Jamon brings a useful mix to this conversation: founder of Infinite Red, longtime consultant, React Native specialist, and now indie game developer. That perspective makes the episode unusually practical. He has spent years watching where projects go wrong when product thinking is weak: bad requirements, unclear stakeholder alignment, UX details nobody owned, and engineers optimizing the wrong thing too early. The thread through the whole episode is durability. Product engineering is not just about shipping faster with agents or getting better at a specific tool. It is about…

Kent talks with Don Norman about why the core work of product engineering has not changed: watch people work, treat so-called user error as a design problem, and fix root causes instead of blaming symptoms. Don walks through a remarkable arc from electrical engineering and cognitive psychology to Three Mile Island, Xerox PARC, Apple, and the first use of user experience in a job title. They talk about timing and failed products, cross-functional product teams, what AI changes for software builders, and why Don now cares most about designing for humanity, not only usability. Don's career makes this episode unusually wide-ranging: early computing, human error, aviation safety, Unix, Apple product decisions, digital cameras, color TV, and the long arc from usable products to systems that shape society. The through-line is straightforward but demanding: if you want better products, watch what people actually do, notice the workarounds they no longer complain about, and treat clusters of small usability problems…

Kent talks with Will King about bringing an industrial design mindset into software: human factors, observing real users, and why good product engineering starts with caring enough to notice what frustrates people. They dig into product debt, support as a product superpower, pruning features without breaking trust, and how to use AI agents for exploration and critique instead of only faster implementation. Will's path runs from designing bucket trucks to self-taught software engineering, education products, and database tooling, and that background gives this episode a distinctive lens: software is still a product people use with bodies, habits, emotions, and mental models. The conversation makes product sense concrete through examples like onboarding timing, course complexity, support workflows, and the small confidence signals that separate stable-feeling products from merely functional ones. You'll hear why watching users work keeps surfacing across this series, how to tell broken experiences from merely…

Kent talks with Aaron D. Francis about product engineering: why ticket-taking implementation is losing ground to agents, what a vertical slice from UI to database really means, and how Aaron’s desktop app Solo came from a painful problem—not a feature spec. They go deep on scratch-your-own-itch products, separating agents from dev stacks, Jobs to Be Done, why users bring you solutions instead of problems, and how empathy (and letting go of “technically correct”) changes what you ship. Aaron builds in public—Laravel roots, education, and now Solo, a terminal multiplexer–style desktop app for organizing agents and dev stacks. This episode is a practical tour of product sense for developers: watching people work, reading support email with empathy, cow paths vs. fences, and why the “right” architecture can still lose if humans go home furious. You’ll hear how Aaron reasons from problem → solution when users ask for worktrees, when to duplicate UI affordances even when the model is “one,” and how introverts can…

Kent talks with Dillon Mulroy, Principal Engineer at Cloudflare, about Agent Experience and dogfooding AI platform work: how Cloudflare closes the loop between builders and customers, why observability and support are product superpowers, and how to stay disciplined when agents tempt you to ship huge diffs overnight. They go deep on watching users work, firehose social feedback, partnering with support, and why “make pain painful” aligns incentives for better software. Dillon’s path runs from internal insurance tools to Vercel Domains to Cloudflare’s agent and dashboard work—always with the same through-line: care about the user, get real feedback, and invest in primitives so delighters don’t collapse under bad foundations. This episode covers metrics and paging as a product habit, learning from customer escalations, scoping small when AI speeds up coding, and building cross-functional relationships (support, sales, finance) as part of engineering judgment. You’ll hear practical parallels with episodes on…

Kent talks with Wayne Allan (engineer, PM, and consultant) about product engineering in practice: why “building the thing right” only matters after you’re building the right thing, how to shorten feedback loops without six-month research theater, and why falling in love with the problem beats falling in love with your solution. They cover scrappy validation, talking to sales and support, the Kano model, *Crossing the Chasm*, and what changes when shipping gets faster than learning. Wayne blends delivery and product leadership—his stories range from a flagship-adjacent launch that nobody used to the everyday discipline of listening to customers without waiting two weeks for a meeting. This episode connects feedback-loop thinking (familiar from CI) to product discovery, yes-and conversations when someone is married to a feature idea, and the difference between hygiene features, performance features, and delighters when teams ship faster than users can absorb. You’ll also hear grounded takes on when “move fast”…

Kent talks with Dax Raad about building OpenCode in a crowded coding-agent market: why dev tools are still a consumer-style product, how fast shipping can make good products feel worse, and what “product skill” actually looks like when agents remove friction from implementation. They dig into onboarding, progressive disclosure, listening across many user requests for the real pattern, and why slowing down can be the right move—even when competitors ship faster. Dax has spent years building tools developers actually use; on OpenCode he’s thinking hard about product process while the space moves at breakneck speed. This episode is a practical look at product deterioration (not just code rot), bottom-up adoption for dev tools, and how coding agents change who decides what gets built—without replacing the need for taste, restraint, and clarity about what problem you’re solving. You’ll hear concrete examples from OpenCode’s terminal UI and onboarding, parallels to Kent’s Epic Workshop app, and a grounded take on…

Kent opens Become an Epic Product Engineer: why product engineering is the durable skill as AI takes on more implementation, what to expect from guest conversations and homework, and where to start in the catalog. (00:00) - Introducing Become an Epic Product Engineer (00:38) - The archer metaphor (00:52) - Knowing what to build (01:05) - Learning out loud with guests (01:18) - Product engineers vs product managers (01:35) - Homework on every episode (01:55) - Episode highlights (02:15) - Better with Kent companion series (02:30) - Homework: subscribe and pick an episode Software keeps changing, and AI is accelerating something that was already true: implementation is getting cheaper while knowing what to build matters more. In this intro Kent frames the show - learning out loud with people who blend technical depth and product judgment - and why developers need product thinking without becoming product managers. He walks through the archer metaphor (better arrows, same need to pick the target), how homework…