Chats with Kent C. Dodds

Kent closes Chats with Kent season 7 and explains what changes on this feed: Become a Product Engineer is now its own podcast, with season 7 episodes and upcoming releases on that RSS feed. He previews guests still in the pipeline and introduces Better with Kent, a new solo series on durable skills for software engineers. Season 7 of Chats with Kent is over. The interview series you have been following as Become a Product Engineer has graduated into its own show. Kent may do another Chats with Kent season later, but for now this episode is the season 7 finale on the Chats with Kent feed. If you have been subscribed here, you do not need to re-listen to old episodes to catch up. The season 7 conversations are already on the new podcast, and the episodes Kent mentions below are scheduled on that feed going forward. Still coming on Become a Product Engineer (among others): Jack Ryan (Intercom) - user empathy, feedback loops, and what not to build Swizec Teller - user outcomes, workflow design, and biotech software Grady Booch - software architecture, human judgment, and AI's limits (including Kent's "Last Software Engineer" framing) Sean Roberts - the technical person in the room and how product engineering differs from product management Ruben Casas - demos, feedback loops, and judgment in the AI product era Lucas Varga (FamilySearch) - helping engineers grow into product engineers Kent is also starting Better with Kent: solo episodes on durable skills - judgment, accountability, empathy, and what stays valuable as AI takes on more implementation - on YouTube and in podcast apps. Homework Subscribe to Become a Product Engineer in your favorite podcast app so you do not miss upcoming guest episodes. Subscribe to Better with Kent on YouTube or your podcast player for the new solo series. If you have not moved yet, open the Become a Product Engineer feed once and confirm you see the season 7 episodes you have already heard - then stay subscribed there for new releases. Resources Become a Product Engineer podcast Better with Kent Chats with Kent (call in) Host: Kent C. Dodds Website: kentcdodds.com 𝕏: @kentcdodds GitHub: @kentcdodds YouTube: Kent C. Dodds Podcast: epicproduct.engineer

Rhys has an unusually current perspective on product engineering because he is working right at the edge of the agent tooling shift. The conversation starts with his recent work on Vercel Domains and then moves into Executor, where the challenge is no longer just implementing integrations, but choosing the abstractions that make a system composable, safe, and pleasant to use over time. What makes the episode strong is how often it comes back to product judgment instead of novelty. Rhys and Kent talk about finding the right primitives, observing how other products solve hard UX problems, resisting the urge to ship every request immediately, and building systems that help agents without letting them become dangerously "helpful." Homework Create a dedicated notes channel or system where you save examples of products doing something well. Use those notes as reusable product input: when you need to build a flow later, pull the examples back up instead of starting from scratch. Resources Executor Rhys Sullivan — site Executor — GitHub OpenCode Guest: Rhys Sullivan Company: Executor GitHub: @RhysSullivan 𝕏: @RhysSullivan Host: Kent C. Dodds Website: kentcdodds.com 𝕏: @kentcdodds GitHub: @kentcdodds YouTube: Kent C. Dodds Video Watch this on YouTube

Alex brings a product and marketing lens that fits this season perfectly: great products do not just solve technical problems, they help the right people recognize that you understand their world. The conversation starts with finding an audience and quickly turns into a practical way to build product sense inside a company: learn how customers describe themselves, observe where they gather, listen for the language they use, and speak from their priorities instead of your own taste. The second half gets into Sales Safari, Stacking the Bricks' observational research practice. Alex explains why surveys and interviews can miss important signal, what to look for in real conversations, and how notes on jargon, pain, worldview, and recommendations can turn scattered internet conversations into useful product understanding. The through-line is simple and demanding: reduce the distance between you and the people you serve so your software, messaging, and decisions feel anticipated rather than manipulative. Homework The next time coworkers or product teammates disagree about direction, step back and observe the conversation. Ask: who is this disagreement in service of? Is it serving the customer, the decision maker, the loudest person, or someone else? Practice this once a day or once a week, then use the patterns you notice to decide what you should contribute. Resources Stacking the Bricks 30x500 The Tiny MBA The Mom Test Alex Hillman on X Guest: Alex Hillman Company: Stacking the Bricks GitHub: @alexknowshtml 𝕏: @alexhillman Host: Kent C. Dodds Website: kentcdodds.com 𝕏: @kentcdodds GitHub: @kentcdodds YouTube: Kent C. Dodds Video Watch this on YouTube

Julius is building right in the middle of one of the fastest-moving product categories in software, and that gives this episode a useful tension: everything feels possible, but that does not mean everything belongs in the product. The conversation covers the shift from one-agent-at-a-time coding to orchestration, why T3 Code focuses so much on a fast app layer, and how Julius thinks about what should live in the core product versus forks, plugins, or future work. The deeper lesson is about judgment under speed. Julius and Kent keep returning to the same idea from different angles: when agents can generate a lot of implementation quickly, the real work is deciding what is worth building, what will age well, and what future decisions you might accidentally box yourself out of. Homework Take a step back and look at your product from the whole picture, not just the slice you currently touch. Before prioritizing a feature, ask whether it keeps the product maintainable long-term and whether it fits the job to be done for your users. Resources T3 Code T3 Chat Julius Marminge — GitHub OpenCode Guest: Julius Marminge GitHub: @juliusmarminge 𝕏: @jullerino Host: Kent C. Dodds Website: kentcdodds.com 𝕏: @kentcdodds GitHub: @kentcdodds YouTube: Kent C. Dodds Video Watch this on YouTube

Jamon brings a useful mix to this conversation: founder of Infinite Red, longtime consultant, React Native specialist, and now indie game developer. That perspective makes the episode unusually practical. He has spent years watching where projects go wrong when product thinking is weak: bad requirements, unclear stakeholder alignment, UX details nobody owned, and engineers optimizing the wrong thing too early. The thread through the whole episode is durability. Product engineering is not just about shipping faster with agents or getting better at a specific tool. It is about understanding people, shaping better requirements, recognizing when the human side of the workflow matters more than the code, and making decisions that keep paying off as the technology changes around you. Homework Sit down with a non-technical person and watch them try to use a feature you built. Write down every hesitation, workaround, double-click, or confusing step you notice, then use that list to reprioritize what you fix next. Resources Infinite Red Jamon Holmgren — site Night Shift Agentic Workflow Gunship Origins on Steam Guest: Jamon Holmgren Company: Infinite Red GitHub: @jamonholmgren 𝕏: @jamonholmgren Host: Kent C. Dodds Website: kentcdodds.com 𝕏: @kentcdodds GitHub: @kentcdodds YouTube: Kent C. Dodds Video Watch this on YouTube

Don's career makes this episode unusually wide-ranging: early computing, human error, aviation safety, Unix, Apple product decisions, digital cameras, color TV, and the long arc from usable products to systems that shape society. The through-line is straightforward but demanding: if you want better products, watch what people actually do, notice the workarounds they no longer complain about, and treat clusters of small usability problems like real product debt. The second half brings that thinking into the present. Don and Kent talk about AI coding tools as force multipliers that still need direction, architecture, and supervision, then zoom out to Design for a Better World and the Don Norman Design Award. The result is a conversation about product sense that spans decades without feeling dated: the tools change, but the responsibility to understand people, systems, and consequences does not. Homework Spend time watching people do real work before you ask them for solutions; observation reveals the hidden setup, workarounds, and friction they now assume are just "how it works." After a release, step back and fix clusters of small usability issues as a system instead of waiting for one confusing bug to become catastrophic. Treat AI as a force multiplier you must instruct and supervise; stay responsible for the problem definition, architecture, and review. Resources Don Norman Design Award (DNDA) Design for a Better World The Design of Everyday Things Nielsen Norman Group — Don Norman United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Guest: Don Norman Company: Don Norman Design Award (DNDA) Host: Kent C. Dodds Website: kentcdodds.com 𝕏: @kentcdodds GitHub: @kentcdodds Youtube: Kent C. Dodds Video Watch this on YouTube

Will's path runs from designing bucket trucks to self-taught software engineering, education products, and database tooling, and that background gives this episode a distinctive lens: software is still a product people use with bodies, habits, emotions, and mental models. The conversation makes product sense concrete through examples like onboarding timing, course complexity, support workflows, and the small confidence signals that separate stable-feeling products from merely functional ones. You'll hear why watching users work keeps surfacing across this series, how to tell broken experiences from merely unpopular ones, why user feedback usually improves polish more than strategy, and how product engineers can stay valuable in an agent-heavy future by understanding both the user and the constraints of the software medium. Homework Use AI agents more for gathering than executing: explore multiple solution paths, adjacent domains, and missing context before you ship. Give agents richer context like user demographics, constraints, and likely mental models, then use your own judgment to evaluate what comes back. Slow down long enough to question assumptions before implementation; use AI as a creativity and critique tool, not just a code accelerator. Resources Will King - site Deploy Empathy (Michele Hansen) The Mom Test (Rob Fitzpatrick) Interface Craft (Josh Puckett) Guest: Will King Company: Crunchy Data GitHub: @wking-io 𝕏: @wking__ Host: Kent C. Dodds Website: kentcdodds.com 𝕏: @kentcdodds GitHub: @kentcdodds Youtube: Kent C. Dodds Video Watch this on YouTube

Aaron builds in public—Laravel roots, education, and now Solo, a terminal multiplexer–style desktop app for organizing agents and dev stacks. This episode is a practical tour of product sense for developers: watching people work, reading support email with empathy, cow paths vs. fences, and why the “right” architecture can still lose if humans go home furious. You’ll hear how Aaron reasons from problem → solution when users ask for worktrees, when to duplicate UI affordances even when the model is “one,” and how introverts can still do discovery by treating outreach like an optimization mission—plus niche opportunities outside the Cursor clone gold rush. Homework When someone asks for a solution (e.g. a feature), slow down and ask what problem they’re really trying to solve—users often lead with implementations. Practice user empathy: imagine someone stressed, trying to finish work; question “technically correct” UX that blames the user instead of protecting them (confirmations, back-button data loss, etc.). If talking to people is hard, reframe discovery as a systematic search (spreadsheet energy, trusted partners, or domain friends)—or pair with someone who loves conversations. Resources Aaron D. Francis — X Jobs to Be Done (Clay Christensen) The Design of Everyday Things (Don Norman) Guest: Aaron D. Francis Company: Solo & Laravel education GitHub: @aarondfrancis 𝕏: @aarondfrancis Host: Kent C. Dodds Website: kentcdodds.com 𝕏: @kentcdodds GitHub: @kentcdodds Youtube: Kent C. Dodds Video Watch this on YouTube

Dillon's path runs from internal insurance tools to Vercel Domains to Cloudflare's agent and dashboard work-always with the same through-line: care about the user, get real feedback, and invest in primitives so delighters don't collapse under bad foundations. This episode covers metrics and paging as a product habit, learning from customer escalations, scoping small when AI speeds up coding, and building cross-functional relationships (support, sales, finance) as part of engineering judgment. You'll hear practical parallels with episodes on delighters and onboarding tension, plus why reviewing agent-written code still matters for system intuition when things break at 2 a.m. Homework Try hard and care a lot; more practically, focus on foundations and primitives. Put good feedback systems in place so you know what's going on with your product and where it doesn't feel good-alerting and metrics, customer journey signals, or customer interviews. If you have a customer support team, sit with them and watch them triage cases for your product; get to know support-they're sitting on a gold mine of product signal-and empathize with them like you do with users. Kent's shorthand for the mindset Dillon agreed with: make pain painful-if your users are hurting, you should feel it too. Resources Cloudflare - Developers Cloudflare Agents Dillon Mulroy - site Dillon Mulroy - GitHub Guest: Dillon Mulroy Company: Cloudflare GitHub: @dmmulroy X: @dillon_mulroy Host: Kent C. Dodds Website: kentcdodds.com X: @kentcdodds GitHub: @kentcdodds Youtube: Kent C. Dodds Video Watch this on YouTube

Wayne blends delivery and product leadership—his stories range from a flagship-adjacent launch that nobody used to the everyday discipline of listening to customers without waiting two weeks for a meeting. This episode connects feedback-loop thinking (familiar from CI) to product discovery, yes-and conversations when someone is married to a feature idea, and the difference between hygiene features, performance features, and delighters when teams ship faster than users can absorb. You'll also hear grounded takes on when "move fast" breaks trust, how AI may reshape search-and-listing UIs, and a concrete reading list: The Mom Test and Crossing the Chasm. Homework Talk to people, ask good questions, and listen—Wayne says that's the biggest hack that's worked in his career. Read The Mom Test: ask how people solved this problem in the past instead of whether they like your idea or would use it—you get far more useful insight (Wayne ties this to caring about the problem, not your solution). Resources The Mom Test (Rob Fitzpatrick) Crossing the Chasm (Geoffrey Moore) Thoughtworks Wayne Allan — LinkedIn Guest: Wayne Allan Company: Thoughtworks 𝕏: @xWayfinder Host: Kent C. Dodds Website: kentcdodds.com 𝕏: @kentcdodds GitHub: @kentcdodds Youtube: Kent C. Dodds Video Watch this on YouTube