Facts and trends

🎥 → 📹

Automation reduces complexity.

☎️ → 📱

Technical progress extends the capabilities.

⚖️ → 💎

Quality can be reproduced.

🧮 → 💻

Productivity depends on creativity, not receptiveness.

🔨 → 🧰

Picking the right tool for the job creates competitive advantage.

🗄 → 🔮

Big data insights shape the business models and product vision.

🗜 → 🎛

Configuration is more flexible than customisation.

📚→🕹

Up-skilling is exciting.

The forecast

When it comes to product engineering, we will see new tools with intuitive abstractions enabling non-technical team members to contribute to the final solution.

Taking new responsibilities will become the driving force behind the motivation for the most talented professionals.

Most of the manual, mundane, and trivial tasks will be automated. Smart automation will surround us with flexible patterns and goal-driven strategies.

No-code, like Bubble or Honeycode, soand heavily templated engines will serve the prototyping purpose taking over the spotlight from Sketch and Illustrator.

Designers and product owners will become engineers with a high-level understanding of the tech stack. Everyone will be able to read code, and most will want to write it.

Coding will become the basis for creative ideas and innovation. It will become imperative for business folks to hang out and speak the same language with engineers. It will be cool to think and speak code.

The new generation of engineers will understand the business rules and emphasise with the customers. To them, programming languages won’t be their career choice but team enablers. Continuous innovation of the tech stack will become one of the business goals.

The choice of the right development environment will include more than familiarity, performance, and the size of the community. The focus will be on the speed of change, extensibility, and low learning curve.

The productivity game will expand beyond the tasks management apps, OKRs, and culture hacks. Winning companies will master the art of onboarding and up-skilling new talent from zero to hero in as little time as possible. Motivation will come from the experimental approach towards user experiences, not from guidelines, best practices, and design systems.

Creative constraints will no longer define the boundaries of professionalism. Unexpected products will get more attention than the polished ones.

Attention will drive adoption and relevance. Design systems will reflect the customer’s state of mind rather than the functional beauty of the art form.

Product strategy will follow rapidly shifting markets. Design and development of interchangeable patterns will turn product owners into feature DJs.

Services and products will become more integrated than ever. Data platforms will initiate new cost-effective standards with accessible APIs and out of the box business intelligence engines.

Accessibility of data-driven insights will shape our understanding of reality. We will iterate on business models rather than on wireframes and designs. The meaning of the moonshot will be to sell first and build later. The abundance of ideas will shorten the retention span.

Specific product capabilities will no longer define the market advantage. User’s loyalty will depend on the connection to the continuously evolving brand’s vision.

Professionalism will no longer be seen as a sum of successes over the the timeline of industry experience.

As we approach the exponential growth curve the ability to learn and traverse horizontally between cross-functional functions will become more desirable than a highly specialised mindset.

Perseverance and grind will make or break us. Failure more often than success will help us find the right path forward. We will have to adjust and put up with unforeseen more than ever before.

The good news is, everything becomes simpler fast. I’m serous! With a bit of training anyone can fly Falcon 9 rocket to the Mars and back, and that’s rocket science we’re talking about.