I talked with Sam Julien about product-minded engineering, why feasibility is no longer enough, and a practical homework assignment: spend ten minutes triaging your backlog.
Sam went from self-taught web developer to DevRel to product. He is Director of Product at CopilotKit and author of Agentic GraphRAG. His article on building a product-minded engineering team is a tour of the product dream-team frameworks - jobs-to-be-done, Kagan's four big risks, LNO, DHM, RICE, North Star - and he kept coming back to LNO as the one that changes how you look at Monday's work.
Leverage, neutral, overhead
Leverage: small effort, outsized outcome. Neutral: necessary, so scope it. Overhead: automate or drop - often a fit for AI. Engineers need that vocabulary so they can push back, especially when the PM is checked out. You can complain that it is not your job, or you can live in the reality in front of you.
We also talked collaborative product-engineering dialogue, gatekeeping sales-driven development, communicating intent clearly when agents execute, and why continuous discovery still matters when the machine will happily build the wrong thing faster.
Homework
Open your backlog once this week. Spend about ten minutes sorting items with a triage lens. Ask why you are doing each thing, what the effort is, and what the value is. Extra credit from Sam: put something recent from Teresa Torres on in the background.
