From Rockets to Roadmaps: An Engineer's Guide to Product Success
Why letting engineers take the wheel might just be the future of product development.
What’s the secret to building better products? Letting engineers drive the vision.
This week, host Ben Lloyd Pearson interviews Austin Spiegel, co-founder and CTO of Sift, who previously spent years leading engineering teams at SpaceX. Austin reveals how SpaceX's unique engineering culture, which eliminated the product management layer, influenced his approach to building Sift, including the implementation of a forward-deployed engineering team.
Austin further argues that we're entering a new era where the most valuable engineers aren't just skilled coders, but also savvy business thinkers.
He believes that as software development becomes easier due to the proliferation of AI, engineers who can connect their technical expertise with a deep understanding of customer needs and market trends will have a significant competitive advantage.
In today’s episode, learn how this approach leads to faster development cycles, happier customers, and more innovative products.
“The people that were successful [at SpaceX] were people who saw engineering and building software as a means to an end... so they really saw it as a tool to go and solve business problems and not necessarily as something to build in and of itself.”
The Download
The Download will leave you defying gravity with this week’s top engineering insights. 🌟
1. Unwrap a new coding challenge every day this holiday season ❄️
Advent of Code is back, stuffed like a holiday stocking with daily puzzles that’ll keep even the sharpest devs on their toes. Created by Eric Wastl in 2015, it’s the perfect chance to flex (or revisit) your skills, experiment with new languages, and maybe even one-up your teammates on the leaderboard.
Who says the holidays can’t be a little competitive? Join the Dev Interrupted leaderboard and see how you stack up this season against your fellow Interrupters. 🥇
Use code 2464202-bd06876b to join the Dev Interrupted leaderboard.
Read: Advent of Code
2. Teamwork makes the code work 🤝
Developer productivity isn’t just about commits or lines of code—it’s about how teams build on collective knowledge to solve problems and innovate together. In this week’s blog, LinearB dives into cumulative culture theory, showing how social learning and collaboration are the real drivers of success in software development. Ready to level up your team’s productivity?
Read: The Role of Cumulative Culture in Developer Productivity
3. Google reinvents chess, but leaves some pieces off the board ♟️
Google’s new chess platform lets players design custom pieces with generative AI, blending artistic freedom with a classic game of strategy. While this showcases AI’s creative potential, the platform lacks essential features like move review and piece capture history, raising questions about its practical value for serious players. Is this a genuine enhancement or just AI for AI’s sake?
Read: Google’s new chess game lets you customize pieces with AI
Help dev teams everywhere by responding to our industry report 🗳️ (sponsored)
LinearB and Luca Rossi’s Refactoring are teaming up to create a comprehensive industry report on how engineering teams use data and metrics to improve their practices. We’ll be giving an exclusive deep-dive on the results in January, but first we need your help!
Our community survey (live now!) will help us collect real-world stories from engineering leaders everywhere. The best insights will be quoted in the final report.
You can participate below 👇
4. Why Netflix stopped hiring only senior engineers 🤔
Why does one of the world’s most innovative companies stop hiring senior engineers? Carol Barrett, Director of Consumer Identity at Netflix, shares her blueprint for balancing team purpose, flexibility, and innovation.