I updated my positioning again (and I'm not sorry about it)
A month ago I called myself a Design Engineer. Then I read one article and everything clicked differently.
A month ago I published a post about why I stopped calling myself a Frontend Engineer. Design Engineer felt closer to the truth, so I went with it.
Then I was scrolling LinkedIn and found this article from PostHog about finding a job as a product engineer. I started reading and had this weird feeling it was written about me. Not aspirationally. Literally. The way they described the role, the instincts, the kind of work that matters. I had been doing that.
So I changed it again. I'm a Product Engineer now.
Yes, it's fast. But I've spent most of my career being afraid of having a presence online, afraid of writing something and looking ridiculous. I decided I don't want to be in the shadows anymore. I have opinions and I want to share them. And part of that is being honest when something doesn't fit, even if you just said it did.
Design Engineer points at craft. The UI layer, the space between Figma and the browser. That's real and I still care about it. But it's not the thing that drives me. What drives me is ownership. Whether we're building the right thing. Whether what shipped actually worked. That's product engineering.
The weird part is that when I look back at my career, this was always true. I just didn't have the name for it.
I built a product from scratch once. User interviews, database design, API contracts, hired the team, shipped it. I've caught broken attribution pipelines costing $30k/month that nobody else noticed. I've been the sole technical owner of a 10-brand retail operation wearing every hat there was. I kept describing myself by the layer I worked in when the real throughline was something else: I find gaps nobody owns and walk into them.
That's what the article touched. And honestly, my history will speak for itself. Once I share it, you'll get why that clicked so fast. But that's a longer story, and you'll have to wait a little.
Building this presence in public, mistakes and redirections included. If that sounds interesting, follow along.