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Develop Yourself
To change careers and land your first job as a Software Engineer, you need more than just great software development skills - you need to develop yourself.
Welcome to the podcast that helps you develop your skills, your habits, your network and more, all in hopes of becoming a thriving Software Engineer.
Develop Yourself
#256 - The Rise of the Product Minded Engineer
Matt Watson, who scaled VIN Solutions to a $150 million exit, shares his journey from coding to building products that make a real impact in the business world.
We talk about:
- Why most developers fail at launching products
- What it means to be a product-minded engineer
- How AI is exposing weak developers
- The importance of sales, customer empathy, and learning in public
“Your code isn’t the product. Solving real problems is.”
“If I have to write requirements down to the detail… I might as well just give it to AI.”
Want to develop the product engineer's mindset? Grab Matt's book here : http://productdriven.com/book
Matt's newsletter for product driven engineers: https://newsletter.productdriven.com/
Shameless Plugs
🧑💻 Join Parsity - For career changers who want to pivot into software.
✉️ Got a question you want answered on the pod? Drop it here
Zubin's LinkedIn (ex-lawyer, former Googler, Brian-look-a-like)
Welcome to the Develop Yourself podcast, where we teach you everything you need to land your first job as a software developer by learning to develop yourself, your skills, your network and more. I'm Brian, your host. Today. I got Matt Watson, who scaled a company from the ground up. He learned firsthand what it takes to go from writing code to building real products, making a big impact. Matt bootstrapped VIN Solutions, grew it to $35 million in annual recurring revenue and $150 million exit, and since then you've gone on to build a company called Full Scale that helps startups scale their engineering teams with top talent from the Philippines, and you have a book that's coming out as well about being a product-minded engineer, which is exactly what I want to talk to you today about. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me, man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm excited, man, because what really kind of drew me to you, and since I've kind of gone through your content, is this focus on building a product mindset, and I think that's something that we don't really talk about in software engineering. Even on my show I'm guilty of this. I talk about here's the things we're going to build, here's how to become technically proficient and gain these skills, but what we don't think about is developing a product mindset, and for a lot of people listening to this show, they're at the very beginning of their career or they're just learning to code. What can you tell me about? What does it mean to have a product development mindset? What is a product mindset?
Speaker 2:Well, I think, as software engineers, most of us think like engineers. We like to build stuff, like give us Legos, and we want to build stuff right, like I have five kids and a lot of my kids are all this way. They just love to build stuff right. So I think all of us are naturally that way. Like there's some weird home project, like we're probably, you know, engineering the thing, like that. It's for a lot of us, it's in our blood, right? The problem is talking to customers, and understanding customer problems is a whole different kind of skill. It revolves like actually talking to people, which a lot of engineers are, let's be honest, are more introverted and don't really want to talk to people. We want to work in the office, in the corner somewhere, with the lights turned off.
Speaker 1:Headphones on Yep, leave me alone Trying to concentrate, yeah.
Speaker 2:But you know I was lucky. My career didn't start that way. I mean, my career started Actually I was selling computers at Sears and a car dealer came in to buy a computer for me and needed help building some software. I'm like sure I can help you. And I was like still in college and so that became my little side projects like I'm. I was learning visual basic. Six was literally like 25 years ago awesome, helping this car deal. I go to the car dealership. He told me like I need this report, I need the screen to do this thing. Can you make it do it? And I'm like sure I can make it do it. Like I had to talk to him and I had to figure out what to build right yeah, yeah so I was fortunate.
Speaker 2:That that's how my career started and and the next company that worked out was same thing. It was very small and it was for a ticket broker. So it's like resale of like concert tickets and sports tickets. I flew all over the country going to their office, talking to them, seeing how they ran their business, getting feedback from them, like literally writing a code on the airplane back home, like Like. So that's how my career started. But that's not the career for most people, which I realized like. A lot of people work at these big companies and they're in a cubicle somewhere on the third floor at the end of the row and they get fed requirements all day and they are so lost from the real world about the work that they do and they've got three layers of management above them that is also lost.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's that feels like it's changing pretty dramatically lately.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's what we see in the headlines all the time and when you dig a little bit further at least from the basic research I've done it's that a lot of these layoffs are so-called flattening the org, which is a term I've heard too. I was a victim of this. I was part of the layoffs of like flattening an org at a big, big company and I noticed I kind of coasted there to be completely honest with you, like I saw it was like in a really big company. I went from really small startups where you almost had to have an opinion about the product. You got to make an impact, right, yeah, right, exactly, and that was a really valuable skill because it really helped me accelerate my career when I got to a big company, because I just kind of cared and I've seen that's a trait that a lot of developers seem to not want to gain or maybe just don't know that they should gain. But why do you think it's like an important thing for software engineers to have to have this product-driven mindset?
Speaker 2:Well, so I in my book product driven I described as like being a disconnected or drift. And I love how you say you didn't care. And I know you don't necessarily mean it that way. You care, but you know it's different and that's why I say it's like you're sort of like disconnected from, like the purpose, like what is your purpose in life? And I'm not. You know, this isn't like a like, like weird theoretical thing, but it's just like when you're writing code all day and you check it in and like I don't know something happens.
Speaker 2:We ship something like I don't know, now it's the next sprint, more crap to do. I don't really know if anything I do matters at all. I have no clue. I just write this code, I check it in and then they give me more crap to do. It feels like working on an assembly line. Yeah for sure. That is what it feels like and you're just like a cog in the wheel and what's important is getting that feedback and visibility to the customer. So you can get some of that feedback and that purpose Like, oh, I heard that this really mattered. It helped sales. We signed up a new customer, we took care of this big issue. This customer was going to cancel, but now they're super happy and here's the feedback we got. All of that stuff is super motivating and it's not that hard to get that information back to the engineering team. It just takes leadership to actually do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the thing I do remember my first job and I had to be on call and during the day, from like nine to five, I used to work for Grocery Outlet and it's a large, it's like a big conglomerate full of these small grocery stores across like California, Oregon to the West Coast, and we'd make the internal web applications for the grocers, for the owners of the stores, and then we'd also have to field their calls on certain days of the week and that was great. It freaked me out, but it also taught me a lot about how people were using the software, Because I'm like wait, what? Why are you doing that? And they'd say things like I don't know who the hell built this, but this is the stupidest software ever.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it stung a little bit, but it was really cool to hear and I've noticed that like that was really my only experience having that happen, Because I noticed over the years like it was like this clear line One of my chapters yeah, one of the chapters in my book is really about empathy and I think it's titled they're just the users. Because it's really easy to slip into that mentality of like losing empathy for the customer and just like I don't really care, I'm just making this thing work. You know the users are stupid, tell them to read the manual, like yeah, but all that kind of attitude is terrible, right, and it's, it's alarming if you actually look at a customer, use your product right, and you get that feedback and you realize, well, first of all, the average person in the world has like a fifth grade, like reading level, yeah, right. And most software engineers are like extremely brilliant, extremely smart people. Our users are not us, right, they are not us at all.
Speaker 2:And I think it's a humbling thing for a lot of developers to really realize like you're, you know the real world of who's using it, and one of the things I mentioned in the book, it's like you're almost have to imagine you're building software for a little kid, or like you as a kid, right, like that's the sort of empathy you should have, cause most of these people are just trying to do their job, whatever the thing is the day. They're trying to order food, books, travel, whatever the thing is, and your software is in their way. They don't want to use your software, they just want to do whatever they got to do put the transaction in and get on with their life Right.
Speaker 2:And you're in their way right now, yeah, and you got to have some empathy about that, like how do I make it a better experience for them?
Speaker 1:That's yeah, that's yeah. I and I've definitely I've fallen into all these traps myself. You know thinking how could you not figure this out? This is so simple.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:I'm thinking that and that was the, that was juvenile and a little naive and arrogant of me. And then watch your five-year-old navigate it.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, I tried to have my kid like. I showed him a tool that I was using, this AI tool, and I was like, oh, this is gonna be so cool him to the dark, so now he'll never come around again, you know. So what do you say? Like here's, here's the common case, right, You're, you're a junior developer somewhere, right, and you get assigned a ticket and you're told to complete it on time. And you take the ticket and you complete it, and you do this a lot of times. How does one in this position, this junior developer get into this product-minded engineering set?
Speaker 2:It starts by just being curious, ask the questions like why are we doing this? Who are we building this for? How is this going to help them? And then follow through like, hey, we shipped this thing last week. How did it go? Yeah, what did the customers think? What did we learn from the deployment? Did we hear they like it? They don't like it. What was the feedback? How can we improve it? Like it just starts with being curious, like caring about having empathy for the customers and the users on the other side. The problem is, a lot of this comes from leadership, though. Right, leadership has to make time for this and has to, you know, push the team to have these conversations where if leadership's like hey, shut up and go, finish those tickets, like you're not going to get there, right?
Speaker 2:yeah?
Speaker 1:that's a good point. I mean, sometimes you you have to work with what you have, unfortunately, but I feel like there's a lot of room for people to to do this to just be like genuinely curious, like how did?
Speaker 2:this thing go.
Speaker 1:Ask these questions.
Speaker 2:And there's probably someone who cares about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, act like you care. That's one of the biggest takeaways I've had from the best developers I've worked with. When I think about all the best people I've worked with, that I really envied it wasn't that they just wrote way better code than me. That wasn't always the case, it often was, but it was a lot of times that they just cared. It's like they read a book about the business. They always had a deeper understanding of the business. That was like the one big thing that I noticed set them apart. It made them really, really valuable. Because there's a lot of people that can write code but there's much fewer people that can understand how that relates to the business, because business is like making money, which I think a lot of people forget about.
Speaker 2:Like they want to delight customers and make cash right and I I tweeted the other day something like it said like if, if you want to learn how important it is to care about the customer, just go start your own software company I was just going to ask you about this, yeah you figure out real fast like it doesn't matter what your opinion is.
Speaker 2:You can sit all day in the basement writing code like none of it matters unless a customer is going to pay for it. You learn very quickly how hard it is to find customers, how hard it is to understand what they want, how hard it is to make them happy. All of that. Building software is hard. I'm not trying to say it's easy, but it's the easy part compared to finding customers and the sales and marketing of a business.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, it's so hard, yeah, so hard. Tell me about it. Okay, I really am curious to ask about this. You have some impressive numbers millions of dollars in exits, multiple SaaS companies. How do you go from idea to like this is an idea that's going to make me a lot of money, because it's obviously not a fluke that you did this a few times.
Speaker 2:Well, so it starts with having some conviction. Right, you know you've got to have a passion for whatever the problem is. That's why when people always they're worried about like I have an idea and I don't want to tell anybody about my idea because they're going to steal my idea, they're not passionate about your idea. Yeah, like somebody came up to me and they had the most brilliant idea for picking up dog poop in my backyard. I'm like that sounds great. You go for it, yeah, right.
Speaker 2:Not going to steal the idea I don't have passion for picking up dog poop, and that's the way almost everybody is going to think about whatever your idea is Right, because when you have this idea and you want to start your own company, you're really signing up for like the next five, 10 plus years of your life to go focus on this thing every day. 99% of other people are not going to line up for that five to 10 year journey with you. They're just not. They're not gonna do it.
Speaker 1:How many times have people come up to you and said hey, I got an idea for this app and you're like you wanna sign an NDA. I'm like I don't sure I'll sign it. There's no way. Your head for sure. No.
Speaker 2:So I there's a term called founder market fit and I have a um. I wrote about this in my newsletter one day, but it's about if you're going to start a company, there should be some like unique special advantage that you have over anybody else that would start this exact same company right, like you. You know it's it's industry specific knowledge. Or you have the networks, like you have the sales and marketing's industry specific knowledge okay. Or you have the networks like you have the sales and marketing side of it down. You have all the relationships. You just need to build the product.
Speaker 2:If you had the product, you could, you could sell it. You've got a lot of money maybe. I mean that can be one. It's like, hey, I've got a huge war chest, I've got the money to go build this thing. Um, it's a first mover advantage. You're like, hey, I very clearly see there's an opportunity here, I can be the first mover and I know I can do this Right. There's got to be a reason. You know, if 100 people went to start the exact same company the same day, why are you going to beat everybody else? And if there's no reason, you're probably not going to beat the rest of them.
Speaker 1:That's interesting.
Speaker 2:There's usually got to be a reason. No-transcript. I built this little thing and I make a few thousand dollars a month from it or whatever, and it's just this little like side hustle. Yeah, probably doesn't matter. But if you're going to build something that's going to scale to like millions of dollars and all that kind of stuff and you're kind of going more big with the whole thing, there's got to be a reason. You're going to beat all those other people. And a lot of times it comes down to sales and marketing. It's like you know how to sell this thing and others don't. Or you're a first mover advantage, or you raised all the money or whatever. There's usually a reason.
Speaker 1:Okay, and so software developers are notorious entrepreneurs. Right, everybody has an app. We have this unique skill, we can build an idea out, but very few of us actually make any money doing it, me included. I've failed like at a few small startups I tried to make. I have a business now, but it's mostly like a coaching, mentorship business for people that want to break into tech. It's not like I originally started, like cause. I really wanted to build stuff and I didn't really have much success with it. What are the mistakes that software developers make when it comes to trying to launch their own product that you see?
Speaker 2:It's the sales and marketing side, right. It's like it's easy to be the engineer, yeah, and want to tinker with stuff and write all the code, but if you don't know how to sell it and you don't know how to differentiate yourself from your competition, like I talked to some some guy this week that had built some little product for like retros, for like sprint retro.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, and my and my comment to him was I'm like this is cool, but like I could use Trello board or Miro, a whole bunch of things to create like a little board, like for a retro, and be like what. What was good in the was bad, what?
Speaker 2:did we learn what could we improve? Whatever? Like I could use excel, like there's a thousand ways I could do this. Why would I buy your product? Yeah, not, I mean he built it. He's like what would be cool? I'm gonna build this thing, okay. Well, that's great, that's cool. Yeah, that doesn't mean somebody's gonna pay for it that's, that's the thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's that's. How are you gonna find?
Speaker 2:those people and if you only sell it for like 10 bucks a month, it's really you have no money for advertising or sales or anything. To find people that are only going to spend 10 bucks a month, right, like, yeah, the business side of this is is is hard.
Speaker 1:How'd you learn the business stuff, did you? Like you don't have a formal business background? Um, but you but. You have a bunch of followers on linkedin, you have a popular podcast newsletter, all these things. How did you learn the art of getting people to pay you money?
Speaker 2:just by doing it, man. I mean, it's like most things in life, like, unless you do it, you really never learn it. It's like my favorite analogy of that is you. You can't learn to swim by reading a book, right? Yeah, and that's the way with most things in life. Like you mentioned before the kid you had kids, right. Like you can't learn to be a parent unless you're actually a parent yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2:The words parenting advice comes from the people that have never had kids. Like I don't even want to listen to those people. No, me neither. They just don't understand. It's like you have to live through so many things in life to really understand and appreciate them and a lot of times it's from all the mistakes, it's all the failures, like we tried this, it didn't work. We tried this, it didn't work, or I was lucky enough.
Speaker 1:We got you know successful this thing is just through the trials and tribulations of it. Man, I feel you. I feel like I'm finally getting some success with business after years of failure and also taking a lot of time to like, understand marketing. I mean, I love to write, but my writing has changed up dramatically because I realized what I like to write isn't necessarily what people want to read, and that's been an interesting game to play. It's been fun, honestly, being online and learning how to get a following of people, and one of the things we tell people at Parsity which we're kind of a little ambivalent about. We say it's probably good advice. Traditionally, it works out that if you chronicle your journey online, you're much more likely to connect with people. Learning in public is a tried and true process that tends to help people get hired a little faster. You've been writing online. You have a pretty massive following on LinkedIn. I don't know about your Twitter. Are you also pretty big on Twitter?
Speaker 2:No, not on Twitter at all.
Speaker 1:I have a.
Speaker 2:Twitter account, but if I tweet I get like 10 views. I'm in the black hole of X.
Speaker 1:I feel you, I think I kind of got into LinkedIn jail somehow. For people that are like learning how to write online, like what's some advice you have for them, especially if they're trying to write with the intention of not maybe it's for like professional reasons, like to grow their network, but specifically with the intention to sell a product?
Speaker 2:I think the biggest feedback is when people are on social media. A lot of times they're looking to be entertained, they're looking to learn something, but it's gotta be like bite-sized lessons, you know, obviously, if they're on Tik TOK or whatever, they're more so in being entertained Like yeah, like business content. Sales content I don't think it works really well unless it's like super entertaining somehow. Sales content I don't think works really well unless it's like super entertaining somehow.
Speaker 2:Cause you just probably like me. You're like that. I don't know, I don't want to, I don't want to know whatever, whatever. Um, but on social media, on LinkedIn, you know, LinkedIn definitely works better.
Speaker 2:I think the key is you want to create content where your target audience can like, see themselves in your story. You know, tell a story about something you're doing, a lesson you learned, a problem that you're facing, whatever, and if they can relate to that story, people like stories and they will engage with those. Like, oh yeah, I can relate to this thing, or I did this thing or I did that thing, or whatever. People really relate to stories and I think telling those kinds of stories about your journey, like you mentioned, is really good.
Speaker 2:And people like to see yourselves in somebody else's shoes and people may think, well, people have nothing to learn from me. Like, why would they read my stuff? But there's always somebody just behind you, no matter where you are in life, there's somebody that just started, that's just behind you, and there's a lot of things that you know, that you may take for granted, that actually are really interesting to the person that's just coming up behind you, right, and that never, that never kind of ends Right, like, yeah, there's always somebody that is more successful, or done something, or done something that I've never done. Whatever it is, you can learn from.
Speaker 1:A hundred percent. In fact, I regret sometimes that I waited till I felt like, okay, now I have the clout that I can like share my journey online, cause I realized the more interesting part of it was not like the day-to-day. The more interesting part was like trying to get to become a software engineer, writing about all the things I was learning in the moment, cause then it was much fresher in my head. Cause now, when I speak to students at Parsity and I see the problems they're struggling with, I'm like, oh yeah, I remember what that's like, but I can't, I just don't relate right, I can talk about what it's like, the difficulty of learning this thing, but I don't really know what you're going through. At this point I kind of remember it's been like 12 years now or whatever, 11 years and it's. It's just not the same and that's much more interesting story, I think, for people to read rather than waiting till.
Speaker 2:You're like's right. They want to relate to the story and how they can learn from it, and I think the power of social media, especially on LinkedIn too, is just. Anytime you're trying to do sales and marketing or find a job or find a business partner or find a thing or whatever referrals the bigger your network is, the easier that stuff is. I I posted one day on LinkedIn about hiring a CTO. Somebody I knew was looking for a CTO and I told him hey, I'll post on LinkedIn for you. Dude, I got dozens, maybe close to 100 people that messaged me about that CTO job. I sent that guy so many applicants and resumes. I need to follow up with him and figure out if he ever hired any of them All because I posted one thing on LinkedIn. That's wild and the power of that is huge. Now, obviously we're in a weird job economy and there's all sorts of issues with that right now. But you know, absolutely, man, anytime you go to launch anything, just the bigger your network is, the bigger your like sphere of influence, the better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it totally. It's like having a nice dedicated audience is cool. I mean, I switched from like doing interviewing services to launching a small like real estate app to now owning this like coding mentorship program and having an audience like it was. It was cool because I had to try out all these different things and have like a built-in, not only network of people. I found my business partner through LinkedIn. I've met people that I've like connected with in real life, like outside of just making money in business stuff. I've like met a lot of really cool people along the way. It's been one of the best things I think I've done with social media. Social media and now it's pretty much I don't really use it for anything besides like business and uh and using LinkedIn, which tends to which tends to be a friendlier platform than like X or something like that where you get a lot of trollish type of people out there.
Speaker 2:You know, weirdly, I met my best friend on LinkedIn. Crazy right. Yeah, he like commented he engaged uh, it was a couple of years ago. Now he like had engaged on some of my linkedin posts and I just looked I'm like he's from the same city I was from and I just messaged him and then come to find out like he just lived right down the street. That's cool. Now we're like it's a bromance, like that's awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it's really cool that can work right. Like people like yeah, linkedin so cringe. Like I met my business partner on linkedin. I bought the business that I currently own from meeting the previous owner on LinkedIn. Never met him in real life, but now, like we have a you know, took over his business. Yeah, it's an amazing platform. If you use it right, you can meet really cool people. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely yeah. And you talk about the sales and marketing side. So for, like my company, Full Scale, that's what drives a huge part of our business. It's posting LinkedIn. You know people, you know it helps build trust and authority and relationships with people and in business, that's, that's the key to everything you know. For, for sales, even hiring people Like I need to make a huge bet. I'm hiring this person because I trust they're going to be the right person for the job, Right, and so, um, it's more important than a resume's, more important resume.
Speaker 1:It feels like, feels like resumes are kind of going out. Um, I, you know I have to ask you about ai stuff because everybody is talking about it and I'm sure you have an interesting opinion. So I think we're all feeling this top-down push to use ai. It feels like, and the the push is basically saying you need to become much more effective with ai, which means essentially, do what you're doing, but faster. So you're not only a software engineer, you're also a CTO, you're a business person as well. What do you feel about this? Are you trying to leverage AI in your business and are you at the stage where you're like I don't need coders anymore, everything's AI. Or are you taking a different approach?
Speaker 2:AI or are you taking a different approach? I think there's certain types of apps and certain types of things that AI can make a dramatic difference. Maybe some little internal thing or whatever. I think for really robust enterprise software, I don't think it's going to replace the whole build of it. It's more of your assistant. It can help you do various different things, different tasks, but you're not going to vibe coding the whole thing, right? Yeah, I have like 250 plus developers that work for us Wow, across 80 different clients at full scale, and so our employees are using all of these different tools and all the different ways and we survey all of them about once a quarter just to kind of see feedback from them.
Speaker 2:We still have like 5% to 10% of our clients that don't even allow using AI. Yeah, for sure, that number has went way down. It was a lot higher. It has went way down. So there's still some of that and I think most of our team we would do like how much of an impact it has on your job, and I think most of them would say you know, it's more of a moderate kind of impact on their job. Yeah, I think some some other studies say like oh, it can help you, like 40% or something like that. Like, I think it's helpful for specific kinds of tasks.
Speaker 2:But the problem with all of this is you've, as an engineer, you still got to know what good looks like. If I tell AI to write a bunch of code for me, how do I know that was the right code? How do I know that was going to solve the business problem the right way? It's like oh, it wasn't optimized for performance or scale, or didn't do batching the right way, didn't use this API the right way, there was a different way, or whatever. You have to know what good looks like. You have to know what does that look like. I think there's a whole lot of developers out there that are not very good and are sort of hunting and pecking, trying code, trying to figure things out, and now you give them a machine that can spit out unlimited code and some of them don't even really know what the code says or does, but somehow or another, they've been working as a developer for a while.
Speaker 1:That's a scary thing. I've noticed I was going really fast with a prototype using it and I was like, wow, maybe what they're saying is true. Maybe I'm late to the party here, maybe I need to open my mind up. Once we got past the prototyping phase and especially doing more back-end work and working with data pipelines, I'm like this is causing junk at scale. It seems almost incentivized to write more code than necessary. It's been trained, obviously, on patterns that you often see, and sometimes those patterns probably come from pretty average or below average resources and so you get kind of average or below average code and it like, yeah, it works, it's not going to architect it for you, right?
Speaker 1:Oh, absolutely not. Yeah, it's a bit scary how fast you can produce really bad stuff really quickly.
Speaker 2:And if you don't know, then you're screwed. So what I write about in the book that I think is absolutely true is AI potentially is moving the bottleneck. So for the last 25 years, software engineering has been very expensive, it's slow, it's complicated, and so we've done all of these things to kind of put the engineers in a box and built all these things around them right. Product managers, project managers, qa.
Speaker 2:DevOps all these different things. So hopefully the developers can be more heads down, talk to DevOps all these different things. So hopefully the developers can be more heads down, talk to less people and write more code. So now, if AI can write the code that much more faster, can all these other people around them keep up? The answer is no, they can't. So if I can write code four times faster, do we need to have stand up like four times a day?
Speaker 1:yeah right, oh yeah right. Wouldn't that be awful right?
Speaker 2:like the, the, the machine of how all this works is sort of being shattered and the roles are all blending right and you've got product managers that are vibe coding and you've got you. You know, and I think the engineers that weren't great engineers are going to get exposed by AI, because it's like now you're over reliant on AI and it's during all this stuff that's just complete junk and crap and you weren't able to recognize that this was complete junk or crap, or you don't know how to explain to AI even how to do what needs to be done, because you don't really understand what needs to be done. Yeah, I think it's exposing some people as well, and some of our developers honestly don't want to use it because they feel like it's going to make them stupider.
Speaker 1:I don't know how I feel about that but I agree, I mean, it's kind of true. After a while I feel like, man, I've barely typed any code and you do feel like, am I losing it? And I, and I'm sure that there's some truth to that. I think there was a study actually that said that it is making us dumber, like over reliance on ai.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's just like we don't remember phone numbers anymore. Right, we have no reason to remember them. It's like the same sort of stuff, like we know where to go find the information but we don't remember it and in that, if you understand like the architecture and the patterns and how to apply the things and what good looks like.
Speaker 2:You know, there's a lot of us like I don't remember the exact syntax for how to connect to a database or whatever I know. If I sat down at the computer and started typing, I would like figure it out super fast. Or I know how to google it and I found it instantly. But I don't have it memorized and that's okay.
Speaker 1:As long as you know like what good looks like, you can figure it out right yeah, I feel like it kind of like elevated, maybe that's if that's the right word like software engineers, to be almost like you're. Like you're a manager and you have a little army of super junior developers that you can kind of deploy out there and um, and I see that I'm curious what you think about this. Like this feels like the beginning of like the meteoric rise, potentially, of the product minded engineer.
Speaker 2:And I'm not just saying that because of your book or anything.
Speaker 1:But it seems like this is that time Cause I'm. I think we're all seeing it. We're seeing that orgs are flattening that's trickling down. Even smaller companies are saying, hey, we can have a five person company with a couple engineers and build a product pretty good, but we can't just tell you what to do, we can't just guide you every single step of the way, and I think that the people that are getting that are going to have a really great time in the near future and beyond.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and if I have to write so requirements that are so detail oriented, I might as well just give that to AI at this point.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, Like for sure, If I have to micromanage every detail of the thing all the way down, I might as well just give that to AI and then AI will write it. Yeah, and absolutely this was the thing that I've really focused on over the last year or two is this. It's like this product mindset. Part of it's really important, especially if we're going to move faster. It's the only way the developers have to understand.
Speaker 2:Why are we solving this problem? How do I know if it worked? How do I iterate quickly with all that Without having 10 times more meetings and all this other kind of stuff? That slows it all down and I liken it to. I feel like software engineers need to be sort of product owners. They don't necessarily need to be the product manager, but they need to be almost like the mini product owner of like they have ownership of this part of the app or this part of the code and they're not just waiting from requirements for somebody else, Like they actually are kind of taking ownership of this thing and then you know how to drive it forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, I've. I've seen that in my own career. I mean, I've worked at really small startups in San Francisco for the most part, where that was kind of a requirement, and I remember even a CTO telling me I was quiet in all the meetings and I was just kind of nodding my head and trying to just, you know, take a ticket which we didn't have or just be like wait till the next time. I was told to do something and I was explicitly told he's like you can't do that. He's like have an opinion on some stuff. And that was kind of like that was a really eyeopening experience for me. That led me down the path of like you know what, maybe I will at least pretend to give a damn. And then once I started seeing, oh, how can I actually? Does this code produce some result? That is good for the business? And that was a really fun game to play and I still like playing that game.
Speaker 1:I don't know if I'm considering myself an entrepreneur, but I own a business. But I also like the idea of the intrapreneur, the person that goes into a company and they think how can I help this company make money? And maybe that will be some benefit to me as well, because if I can help you make money, then I can only imagine that my career here will grow and flourish compared if I try to do my own business. And before I let you go, I'm curious what do you think about in software engineers being entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs? Which? Which path would you suggest most software engineers take?
Speaker 2:I think both are great. I think it depends on the level of risk that you want to take. Right, there are some people that are willing to take the risk and go start a company. Versus if you can work at a company that allows that sort of internal innovation, I think it's fantastic, right if, if you're, you're gonna get to build greenfield project and build cool new stuff and all that like sounds great without having all the risk. But if you really want to have the big upside of all that you got to take, you got to take all the risk yeah, if okay.
Speaker 1:Last thing what if you were going to build a product today? What do you think it would be?
Speaker 2:well, I'm building one right now. It's like actually a social selling product for linkedin.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay, okay, do you think, is that like? Do you see like a, a trend or or so, when it comes to SaaS products?
Speaker 2:I mean not necessarily.
Speaker 1:I mean you mean in regards to the social selling part of it, or you mean SaaS in general. Just like in general. Just like SaaS in general. I think a lot of developers we tend to overthink about the tools we use, right Like thinking, oh, it would be cool. For example, you talked about the guy that did the stand-up app or something. Yeah, retro thing or something like that. We think of more code generation tools.
Speaker 2:I think you highlight. The biggest problem for software developers that want to be entrepreneurs is they don't have deep industry knowledge and that's where a lot of the money, big money, comes from, of making these startups that are in weird niches and industries. All of my, my first company, was in for car dealers, you know, and if you don't have that industry knowledge, it would have been super hard to like go start a company in that industry. Yeah, so, yeah, most software developers are like make very general, generalized tools, like something for retros or another project management tool or a placement for jira or whatever, whatever, like where the real money is in the, in the niches. And maybe the best thing you can do is go work in a specific industry for a while and you understand the industry and now you're like okay, now I'm going to go start a company in that industry because I've worked in that industry for a while.
Speaker 1:That might be the best advice I've heard. That might be Cause I think back to every company where I worked where they had a lot of success. One was a shipping container company and the engineers they lived with this guy at the shipping docks in Oakland, the port of Oakland, and they just stayed with him for months until they understood the industry. Then I saw one for bounty hunters and then I was at a company recently for procurement specialists and I'm thinking oh, this is really interesting.
Speaker 1:Or a banking one. This guy did like a banking app for like loan transactions or something like that, and now he's a multimillionaire and yeah, it's never anything cool, right, it's never like no it's not, it's not cool.
Speaker 2:My last product I had I sold was for plumbers and HVAC and electricians. Holy moly, hel for plumbers and HVAC and electricians. Holy moly Helping them get leads.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, of course. Yeah, because what do people want? People want more money. Yeah, if you can help someone else make money then like oh, why wouldn't they give you money? Man, that's awesome, I think that's Witches in the niches.
Speaker 2:Take away nothing else.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's super underrated. And great advice when can will find you online?
Speaker 2:Productdrivencom, you can find our uh my newsletter and book and stuff. So my book comes out uh July 17th. Um, definitely follow me on LinkedIn she mentioned. I have a huge following on LinkedIn and post every day.
Speaker 1:Um, I'm on all the socials you can find me, but it'll be on the show notes as well. I love reading your LinkedIn posts. I'm shocked I was not connected. I'd come across some of your posts, naturally, but now I'm like I was reading through them before this. I'm like, oh, you write some really good stuff. Yeah, really great person to follow. Thank you so much for being on the show Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. That'll do it for today's episode of the Develop Yourself podcast. If you're serious about switching careers and becoming a software developer and building complex software and want to work directly with me and my team, go to parsityio and
