Meikel Ratz is a product engineer at PostHog, where he leads the messaging team. In this episode, we unpack the product thinking behind that role and what it takes to become a product-minded engineer: understanding customers, making product decisions, thinking about revenue, and deciding what to build instead of simply working through tickets.
In our conversation, we discuss:
1. Why solving problems, not writing code, has always been the real job of software engineers
2. “Snacking work”: the small, satisfying tasks that consume time without creating much impact
3. How PostHog gives engineers ownership over customers, product decisions, reliability, and revenue
4. How engineers can develop product and business sense, even if they’ve spent their career being handed tickets
5. Why data should drive product decisions, when gut feeling is still useful, and how AI changes the economics of experimentation
Episode transcript: https://productengineers.com/episodes/season2/why-just-coding-isnt-enough-anymore/
Where to find Meikel Ratz:
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meikelratz/
Where to find Peppe:
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peppesilletti/
• X: https://x.com/peppesilletti
• Website: https://peppesilletti.io
Where to find The Product Engineers Podcast:
• Website: https://productengineers.com
In this episode, we cover:
(01:29) What is the role of a software engineer in the AI era?
(07:09) Snacking work, hard problems, and engineering impact
(14:01) Product engineers, product managers, and company culture
(23:21) What it means to be a product-minded engineer
(29:31) How to develop business and product sense
(34:13) Start with users, then business, pricing, and product vision
(39:03) How PostHog uses data to make product decisions
(43:02) Data, gut feeling, and experimenting cheaply with AI
(44:50) What to do when engineers are just handed tickets
(48:53) Where to find Meikel
Referenced:
• PostHog: https://posthog.com