Product Thinking for Engineers

Successful software engineers know the difference between delivering code and delivering business value. Product Thinking for Engineers teaches you to look beyond the next technical task on your to-do list and see the big picture of the products you're creating. In this interesting and challenging new book, author Jon Bennallick helps you build the skills you need to engage meaningfully with user research, contribute to trade-off discussions, understand costs and commercial value, and spot low-value work before it burns months of development time. In just a few easy-to-follow chapters, you’ll go from writing code to actively shaping what gets built, so you can speak to the value of your work even as software engineering radically shifts and changes.

We’re in an AI world, and this book focuses on one thing AI can’t automate: judgment. Every lesson is anchored in a real project—including the ones that went wrong—with author Jon Bennallick’s own mistakes left in for you to learn from. And you’ll recognize the example scenarios immediately, because they’re rooted in real work at agencies, scale-ups, and SMEs, often with no dedicated product team to lean on.

As a developer, you’ll appreciate that this book isn’t trying to make you into a product manager. It’s about becoming an engineer whose instincts about users, priorities, and trade-offs make the whole team sharper. You’ll learn to build products that are actually valuable, translate user feedback into decisions your team can act on, and know where your judgment lands hardest in product conversations. When you spot low-value features, you’ll learn how to properly push back, to ensure your contributions are visible and that you’re hard to replace.

There’s no code, no software stack, and no quickly outdated tool examples. Instead you’ll explore case studies and concrete examples as you build the durable, universal judgment that separates coders from engineers who engage in product thinking.