We are all Product Engineers now

Laurie Voss:

At some point every piece of software is a formalization of a human desire. Somebody wanted something, and the software is a precise enough statement of that want that a computer can act on it.

We’re all about to become formalizers, but to do that, we first have to listen.

The input the software development industry is about to need in unlimited quantities is people who can extract requirements from humans, define good, and exercise taste, and we do not make those people

Of course, listening is hard. So nerds are gonna try and make an automated, scaled version of listening that takes humans out of the equation, but it just ain’t gonna work very well.

You cannot do product discovery mechanically short of reading people’s thoughts. You can't train it into a model, because it isn't in the training data, because it's in the head of one specific baker who's never written it down and wouldn't know how to if you asked them. Somebody has to go and get it out of her, and then turn it into something exact enough to build, and then check that what got built is actually what she meant, which it never is the first time.