There are countless books that teach developers how to improve systems—design patterns, architecture, performance, scalability—but far fewer teach them how to improve products. From my experience, many developers think product decisions belong to someone else. But the code we write—APIs, libraries, internal tools—is also a product. It has users. And those users would benefit enormously if we adopt a product mindset. This book fills this gap.

The author is a developer—formerly at Meta and Stripe, now improving the developer experience at Temporal—and he writes directly for other developers. It’s one of the most important technical books published in recent years. I really enjoyed reading it.

If more developers read this book, we would build products that users truly love. Instead of losing their patience dealing with frustrating issues, they would spend their time enjoying unique features we enjoyed implemented.

The ability to focus on both the system and the product will become increasingly valuable, now that AI agents are writing more code for us, taking care of low-level details, so we can now focus more high-level ones. Product design is clearly one of the skills we need to develop.

I’m convinced backlog refinement sessions would be far more engaging if developers were more curious about product thinking. In fact, our entire job would be more interesting if users loved our products more.