Triage your backlog with LNO - product-minded engineering with Sam Julien

If you ship features and never hear what users actually said, this episode is for you. Kent talks with Ben Vinegar - co-founder of Modem, formerly founding engineer and VPE at Sentry - about aggregating feedback, eliminating adoption barriers, and keeping human judgment in the loop as AI speeds up shipping. They cover FreshBooks-era product engineering, Modem's approach to capturing feedback across Slack, Discord, GitHub, and support tools, and why five real conversations beat a median LLM opinion.

If your backlog is full of tickets and zero customer contact, this episode is for you. Kent talks with Teresa Torres - product discovery coach, author of Continuous Discovery Habits, and host of Just Now Possible - about why engineers belong in discovery, what "just now possible" really means, and how curiosity beats solution advocacy. They cover opportunity solution trees, confirmation bias in decision-making, the Mom Test trap of pitching your solution, and homework that starts with one real conversation (or observing one).

If you still build for an audience of one and get defensive when users "use it wrong," this episode is for you. Kent talks with Mark Techson - staff developer relations engineer on Angular at Google - about empathy as a career differentiator, listening without defense, and why knowing what to build still beats vibe-coding forever. They cover internal tools as real products, a fitness-app failure that forced better questions, Google Developer Experts as a feedback loop, durable expertise in the AI era, and why attention is the scarce resource when anyone can ship. Mark Techson (legal name Mark Thompson) has spent about twenty years building software - teaching, senior engineering roles, a fitness startup, American Express fraud tooling, healthcare exchange apps, and now staff DevRel on Angular at Google. The views in this episode are his own; he notes he works for a major frontier-model provider. The through-line is empathy. Mark's number-one product-engineering skill is putting yourself in the end user's seat before you ship. Engineers who only implement tickets miss the concert of perspectives PMs, EMs, and builders bring when everyone aims at the best user experience. He compares great teams to a film set where talent still suggests a shoulder turn that makes the scene land. Listening without defense is the mechanism. Feedback means either you built it wrong or they cannot see how it works - both are actionable. Mark's hard lesson was a fitness app he built for himself: even his wife chose another app. Surveys flipped his assumption from "customize everything" to "just tell me what to do." At Google he leans on Angular GDEs and a simple reply to angry comments: tell me more. They also talk AI. Expertise is not going out of style - Mark uses a guitar-tuner analogy: auto-tune does not erase your ear. Knowing what to build, who to build for, and how to orchestrate agents matters more as code gets cheaper. Kent adds that human attention stays finite even if tokens get cheap. Mark closes against the "you're left behind" narrative: you do not have to live on the bleeding edge, but ignoring AI is the only wrong move. Homework: write a prompt for the first basic version of a product you have been postponing, run it in any AI tool, and notice what you failed to specify. Homework Pick a product idea you have postponed for lack of time or skill. Write a prompt that describes only the first basic version - not the million-dollar finished product. Run that prompt in any AI coding tool, then list what was missing from your prompt and iterate toward that first version. Resources Mark Techson Mark on X Mark on GitHub Mark on LinkedIn Angular Google Developer Experts Guest: Mark Techson Company: Google GitHub: @MarkTechson 𝕏: @MarkTechson Host: Kent C. Dodds Website: kentcdodds.com 𝕏: @kentcdodds GitHub: @kentcdodds YouTube: kentcdodds-plus Podcast: epicproduct.engineer Mark's views are his own. He notes he works for a major frontier-model provider (Google).

If execution got cheap and you still wait for someone to tell you what to build, this episode is for you. Kent talks with Joyce Er about five years owning features on VS Code, the jump to product at Cerebras, and why trust is the metric that tells you the work is working.

If you ship a feature and never click through it yourself, this episode is for you. Kent talks with Rita Kozlov, VP of Product for Cloudflare's developer platform, about the line between product managers and product engineers, why ownership still matters when prototypes look real, and how far upstream an engineer should insert themselves.