Keep a friction log and read a sales book - product ownership with Joyce Er

Kent C. Dodds introduces the episode focused on product engineering, speaking with Joyce Er, who has experience both as a software engineer at Microsoft on VS Code and now as a product manager at Cerebras. Joyce shares her recent transition from building tools primarily as an engineer, witnessing the evolution of AI like GitHub Copilot, to managing products where she now influences the entire end-to-end experience. She highlights her work at Cerebras, which produces massive wafer-scale chips for AI inference, showcasing her involvement in cutting-edge hardware technology.

Joyce discusses how traditional software engineering—focused heavily on writing and designing code—has transformed, especially with AI's rise. She notes that the implementation phase now takes a smaller fraction of developer time, shifting focus toward understanding the 'why' and 'who' of what is being built. She emphasizes that on the VS Code team, engineers owned the entire feature lifecycle, fostering a culture of ownership based on trust and accountability. This ownership model is crucially more important with AI, where execution costs are lower but judgment and cohesiveness matter more.

Joyce describes practical ways to foster ownership within teams, such as daily stand-ups where team members present and defend their features and a practice called dogfooding, which involves using your own product daily. She explains that these rituals help team members develop judgment, sense of responsibility, and a holistic understanding of the user experience. For example, if team members won’t use the features they build, that's a warning sign. She underscores the importance of trust, shared responsibility, and personal initiative in creating a cohesive, high-quality product.

Joyce argues that judgment in product engineering comes from lived experience and continuous feedback, such as maintaining a friction log—a daily list of user frustrations or inefficiencies. She advocates for reading sales and business-focused books, like 'The Qualified Sales Leader,' to understand how value is communicated and how decisions impact business success. These habits help engineers develop informed opinions about what to build, how to prioritize, and how to craft products that genuinely serve user needs.

Joyce explains that in larger or more complex organizations, collaboration with dependent teams is essential. She suggests that initial alignment on goals, building good relationships, and understanding other teams’ priorities can help influence dependencies. She recommends in-person interactions, curiosity, and engaging with teams beyond immediate scope to broaden understanding of system primitives and opportunities, which she considers a human skill unlikely to be replaced by AI. These relationships enable better product decisions and smoother workflows amid dependencies.

Addressing the need to unlearn outdated assumptions, Joyce emphasizes that AI models now produce entire applications with minimal input, rendering many old priors about programming obsolete. She advises newcomers and experienced engineers alike to maintain open minds, spend time experimenting with new tools, and embrace the rapid pace of change. Joyce highlights learning from experiences like React Hooks to adapt quickly, stressing that those who are willing to unlearn and experiment will find abundant opportunities in this fast-moving landscape.

Joyce concludes by reinforcing that trust—both from customers and team members—is the ultimate measure of successful product engineering. She shares her personal journey of shifting from engineering to product management, emphasizing that gaining trust and aligning with user needs are foundational. She recommends maintaining a friction log as a tangible practice for developing product sense, and reading sales books to better understand business value. She invites listeners to follow her on social media for ongoing insights, affirming that curiosity and relationship-building are key human skills in this field.