It seems design engineers are beginning to get credit for the amazing work and contribution they can bring to any technical team and startup founders.

It was only but a few years ago people were still arguing “should designers code?” Unknown to them that the 10x designer like myself and others have already started coding and building products.

Fast forward to today and most teams are looking for designers with coding experience either Frontend or mobile and are willing to pay a lot to hire such talent.

As a by-product, some technology leaders and recruiters have adopted the term “design engineer” to describe designers that can also code, but I think this lacks depth and is limiting in every way to what the role actually entails. Let me explain.

Traditionally, product designers, unlike UI/UX designers, are expected to understand not just design but also product. This means they have to learn other skills like Go to market, Customer Segmentation, Pricing strategies…etc. and design.

There is a whole lot of work that goes into that process that isn’t just design. So when such a talented person also has the ability to implement some of those designs as code, I believe calling them a “Design Engineer” isn’t fitting and in fact, I think it's a bit belittling to limit the skill set to just design and engineering. This limits the role to a designer that codes up their UI only, but this isn’t the case at all. A more fitting description is “Product Engineer.”

Product design + engineering skill = product engineer

A product engineer is a person that defines the product strategy of a software product and is able to implement the designs and code necessary to bring the idea to life.

I’ve always pushed for more designers to evolve into the role, of course, it's not for everyone. Some would remain UI designers, some would become product designers, but only but a few would unlock Product Engineer and to those few I say to you. Pick a project and build to launch it can be anything just ensure to do this. This is your most important task.

Thank you for reading.