Shifting from Code-Centric to Product-Driven
I became an engineer because I liked building things. For a long time, that meant solving technical problems and writing good code. Someone else decided what to build; my job was to build it well.
That stopped being enough. I saw products fail even when the code was solid. The backend was fast, the frontend was clean, and still no one used what we shipped. A perfect implementation of the wrong thing is still the wrong thing.
So I started reading about product management. Not to become a product manager, but to understand the context around the code. Who is this for? What problem does it solve? Why will they choose this over what they already have? Those questions turned out to be harder than any optimization problem.
The shift changed how I measure my own work. Shipping a feature used to feel like the finish line. Now I care more about whether the feature gets used, whether it actually solves the problem, and what we learn from it. The satisfaction is different. It takes longer to arrive, but it lasts longer too.
If you write code and feel the same itch, start asking those questions earlier. You don't need a new title. You just need to care about the problem as much as you care about the solution.