I talked with Drew Hoskins about product-minded engineering as a career shape, the otter metaphor from his book, and homework you can finish on one page: sketch a feature's user journey and hunt for plot holes.
Drew (he also goes by Andrew) wrote The Product-Minded Engineer. Compiler engineer at Microsoft, deep systems at Facebook and Oculus, Workflow Engine at Stripe, a PM stretch at Temporal, then back to Stripe engineering after the book. At Facebook, Kent Beck's staff archetypes named "product hybrid" as a real mode. Drew doubled down instead of managing.
Plot holes beat polite agreement
User interviews go wrong when you summon what he calls the Cthulhu effect - leading people into agreeing with your idea. Sketching the journey - discovery, understanding, usability, safe usability - forces you to see where the story breaks before you ship.
We also talked balancing systems thinking with user empathy, the rule of three for generalization, and reviewing systems instead of only diffs as agents write more code. Deferred trust and conditional approvals are showing up everywhere. Test slop is a sibling problem: agents assert the wrong things unless someone is watching the product behavior.
Homework
Take a feature you are working on. Sketch the user journey in detail. Look for plot holes - how users find it, how they understand what it means, where they get stuck.
