Kent kicks off Chats with Kent season 7: why product engineering is the durable skill as AI takes on more implementation, and how this season’s guests will help you move closer to product thinking—empathy, problem clarity, and building the right thing before making it right.
Software keeps changing, and a lot of the spotlight is on AI—but the shift Kent cares about is bigger than models and agents. Implementation is increasingly delegated to tools that will keep improving; quality, review, and craft still matter, but the gap that won’t go away is product: understanding users, clarifying problems, and shipping what actually helps.
This season is a deliberate tour of product engineering: conversations with people who blend product judgment with technical depth—including PMs and engineers who’ve crossed that line. The goal is the same as it’s always been for Kent’s teaching: give you durable skills. Right now, that means leveling up how you think about product, not just how you type code.
Homework
Write down one product decision you influenced (or wish you had) in the last month—what would you validate earlier next time?
Pick an app you use weekly: what problem is it really solving for you, and where does it feel like the team lost the plot?
Subscribe or follow Chats with Kent so you don’t miss the guest episodes in season 7.
Resources
Guests
Transcript
Hello, everybody. My name is Kent C. Dodds, and for the last, well over a decade, I've been teaching many of you how to build excellent user experiences with software.
And now software is changing considerably, and not just because of the AI thing, but just actually, the changes are things that have always been valuable.
But yeah, largely, because AI is handling so much of the implementation that we're doing. And yes, of course, you need to monitor the situation and you need to review the code and all of those, those really good quality software development practices still matter a great deal.
That said, agents are going to continue to improve and will need less hand holding potentially in the future. Nobody really knows what that future is.
But one thing I can tell you is that there is a skill that has been valuable since the beginning of software. And I expect will continue to be valuable till the day that software developers are no longer a discipline. And that skill is product engineering.
And so that's why this season of the chats with Kent podcast is all about becoming product engineers. And so I'm going to be talking to some of the best product engineers that I know that some of them are actually product managers and maybe engineers who turned product manager.
Because my thesis is that we've got product managers over here and we've got software developers over here. And as AI is kind of taking over lots of the implementation of software, software developer skills are going to need to get a little bit closer to where product managers are.
I do think that there's still a distinction there. But I think that the skills that product managers have, which are like user empathy and that sort of thing. And like problem clarity and all of that, those skills are things that you need to develop as a software developer.
So I'm just continuing what I've always done, trying to give you the tools and the skills that you need to be the most effective software developer that you possibly can be.
And what that means now, the durable skill I can give you now is the ability to understand product and how to empathize with users, how to understand their problems, how to fall in love with a problem, and not with your solution, how to build the right thing first, and then make that thing right. So many things.
And we've got lots of really awesome guests that are going to be showing up in this season of the chats with Kent podcast. I cannot wait to take you on this journey to learn all about product engineering with me.
And this is how we get started. So look forward to the episodes coming out in the chats with Kent podcast season seven. We'll see you in the episodes.
