Note – These are reflections from my experience building and scaling deep-tech startup as a founding engineer. Not related to any specific company or product. Not all ideas are fully formed yet.

Product Development for Engineers

TLDR: Your Engineer needs to talk to users and not to managers!

Distance from users = Distance from truth. You will be surprised how few engineers actually talk to users. Most of the time, they are busy talking to managers, product managers, and other engineers.

Recently I heard DHH saying something like this: “ Humans don’t scale.” It struck me as a profound truth.

Product development isn’t rocket science.

  • Build stuff people want.
  • Ship it fast.
  • Listen to Users and Fix what breaks.

At its core, it’s just: build something real users love. But in bloated orgs, this clarity is buried under layers of abstraction.

Real builders - the engineers, designers, and PMs who actually ship things - are often disconnected from real users. Feedback loops are filtered through dashboards, tickets, and “customer success” summaries. Meanwhile, features get greenlit not because users need them, but because someone needs a promotion bullet point.

In this mess, the most powerful advantage is proximity to truth: talking to users directly, shipping fast, iterating with care and lean engineering teams.

That’s why small teams and lone developers - with no red tape, no endless approvals - have built some of the best products in the world. Because they’re not optimizing for org charts or quarterly OKRs. They’re optimizing for delight, speed, and usefulness.

There are several examples -

  • Basecamp: Built by a small team focused on solving their own problems, not chasing market trends. They have team of 2 people - 1 designer and 1 developer - who ship features directly based on user feedback.
  • Gmail: Launched by a single engineer, Paul Buchheit, who wanted to solve his own email frustrations. He built it in his free time, focusing on speed and simplicity.
  • Telegram: Less than 30 engineers and 900 million users.
  • John Carmack: The legendary game developer who built the original Doom and Quake engines with a small team (probably 4), focusing on technical innovation and user experience.

You don’t need permission to build something great. You don’t need a perfect roadmap. You don’t need executive alignment.

You need to solve a real problem better than anyone else.

Everything else is just corporate cosplay!