Engineering Practices
How good engineers approach building — useful for a PM to internalize. Distilled from working as a PM at an early-stage startup.
Requirements first, then build
The practice that separates strong engineering work:
- Go back to the requirements. Re-read what’s actually being asked before writing code.
- Build simple things that solve the requirements. Solve the stated problem — don’t gold-plate or pre-build for imagined futures.
- Build multiple options across the spectrum. Rather than committing to one design, sketch several (cheap-and-simple → robust-and-complex) and choose with eyes open.
This maps directly onto product work: clarify the requirement, build the minimal thing, hold a few options.
Understand how GitHub fits together
It’s worth knowing how GitHub actually pieces together — repos, branches, commits, pull requests, reviews, and how a change flows from a local edit to merged code. You don’t need to be an expert, but understanding the pipeline makes you fluent in how work ships and lets you read the team’s pulse from the PR queue. (For credentials, see GitHub-Access-Tokens.)
Learn by playing, and take on small projects
- Play with codebases and an AI assistant to build intuition — read real code, ask the model to explain it.
- Take on small projects and learn from your mistakes. Being even a little technical is powerful leverage, including for a non-technical founder — it improves how you spec, estimate, and earn trust with engineering.