Why do I call myself a product engineer?

In high school I was doing graphic design. Not as a career plan, just because I had Photoshop and I liked making things. Logos, flyers, posters for people around me. At some point someone asked if I could make a website. I said yes without knowing how.

I designed the whole thing in Photoshop. Then I sliced it into PNG images and put them inside an HTML file. That was the website. It looked exactly right on my screen, whether it worked anywhere else is a different question. But I shipped it, and someone paid me, and that felt like something real had happened.

Then I actually learned to program. JavaScript, then more. I remember the exact feeling when it clicked. It was not like studying for an exam. It felt like someone had quietly handed me a superpower and walked away. You could describe what you wanted and the machine would do it. Not a drawing of a thing, the actual thing, running, that other people could open and use. I was in high school in Sfax and I had access to that. That felt insane to me.

I kept going because I kept hitting walls. I understood the frontend but not what was behind it, so I learned backend. Then I didn’t understand how any of it got onto a server, so I learned deployment, then infrastructure. Not because someone told me to. Because every part I didn’t understand felt like a ceiling I wasn’t supposed to touch, and I have always had a problem with ceilings.

At my first real job I was doing all of it. Writing the frontend, reviewing the API design, configuring the machines, then opening the browser to make sure the button still looked right. I was doing support, sitting in client calls, pushing back in standups, writing specs that didn’t exist yet. Nobody asked me to do all of that. It just felt wrong to stop at the edge of what I was officially responsible for.

That is when I started understanding what the title actually means. It is not about knowing frontend and also knowing backend. Plenty of people do that. It is about caring what happens after you ship. It is about sitting with the outcome instead of handing it to someone else the moment the PR is merged.

A product engineer is someone who asks “why are we building this” before asking “how.” Someone who watches what happens in production and feels responsible for it. Someone who, when the client says the app feels slow, does not wait for a ticket. They open the profiler.

I did not set out to become that. I was just a kid who made a fake website out of PNG images because someone needed a website and I wanted to figure it out. Everything after that was following the same instinct: close the gap between what you can imagine and what you can actually ship.

The title “product engineer” is just what you call it when you never really stopped doing that.