Product Leaders want Engineering Missionaries—but too many are training Mercenaries

By Andrew Park | 2025-04-24

Every Product Leader dreams of having engineers who are mission-driven—who care deeply about solving customer problems, challenge assumptions, and shape the solution alongside Product and Design.

What you want are engineering missionaries.

But what many organizations unintentionally create are engineering mercenaries—teams trained to wait for instructions, deliver tasks, and stay disconnected from the “why.”

And one of the most persistent reasons this happens?

You’re still asking your Product Managers to write user stories.

AI Is Unlocking a Better Possibility

In a conversation this morning with Swapneel Mahajan, a Product Leader at 8x8, he shared how AI is streamlining the creation of specs and user stories:

“With AI, it’s easier to take the drudgery out of writing user stories and produce better, more consistent specs. In general, AI is allowing me to generate more artifacts with better quality quickly, so my requirements and specs are better than ever.”

That’s meaningful progress—and it’s helping many teams reduce friction and improve clarity.

But as Product Leaders, we now have an opportunity to go further.

You might consider a different path—one I chose in 2004—not to write user stories faster, but to get out of the user story business entirely.

Instead of making documentation more efficient, shift ownership to Product Engineers who are immersed in product context and capable of shaping solutions alongside Product and Design.

Why I Moved My Teams Away from User Stories

In the early 2000s, I saw a pattern that was holding my teams back: the more our software engineers were spoon-fed user stories and detailed requirements, the more they disengaged from the product vision. They delivered outputs. But they didn’t think deeply about the product or the customer. They were engineering mercenaries.

In 2004, I put training systems in place to upskill all our software engineers into Product Engineers—engineers who could take on tactical ownership of spec-writing, implementation breakdown, and feasibility exploration. Not code monkeys. True product collaborators.

This shift aligned closely with a concept coined by VC John Doerr in a 1999 Harvard Business School speech, where he contrasted engineering missionaries—those driven by purpose—with engineering mercenaries who simply follow instructions. I hadn’t heard the phrase at the time, but when I later came across it, it perfectly captured what I had been working toward all along.

The Result: Strategic Leverage for Both Sides

This shift creates powerful leverage for both Product Managers and engineers:

Product Managers gain the ability to manage much larger slices of the product—or even entire products, instead of being limited to narrow feature sets. This greatly increases their strategic impact and accelerates their career growth. They have more time for customer research, outcome alignment, roadmap narrative, and cross-functional leadership.

Engineers grow in missionary zeal—because they clearly understand how their work connects to customer outcomes. They stop just delivering outputs and start driving real results. All engineers are wired to solve problems, but too often, they’re kept at a distance from the people they’re solving for. Give them exposure to customers—or the closest possible proxy—and you unlock energy, creativity, and purpose. That’s how ownership starts!

A Path Product Leaders Might Consider

If you’re leading a product organization, you might consider shifting your investment strategy:

Consider investing in growing your software engineers into Product Engineers.

It’s more achievable than ever. GenAI accelerates learning and reduces tactical load. When engineers adopt tools like Bolt, Cursor, and Copilot aggressively, they gain back time—and you gain the opportunity to evolve their role into something far more impactful.

This isn’t just about efficiency.

Making this shift can help scale your Product Leadership.

You can increase the strategic bandwidth of each Product Manager. You can elevate engineering influence. You may no longer need to slice the product thin just to manage it. And most importantly: you stop reinforcing the pattern that turns engineers into mercenaries.

The Rise of the Product Engineer

The traditional software engineer who just codes to spec is no longer sufficient.

The Product Engineer is the future.

In recent years, the Product Engineer trend gained traction when many Product Owners were laid off and teams responded by selecting one engineer to absorb the tactical responsibilities—essentially serving as the interface between the Product Manager and the rest of the engineering team. That model is a start, but it only goes so far.

What I’ve focused on—and what I believe unlocks the real magic—is upskilling all software engineers into Product Engineers. When all the engineers on the team have product context, customer awareness, and tactical fluency, it becomes easy to shift the tactical burdens off Product Managers. And more importantly, you don’t just get one engineering missionary—you get a whole team of them.

They understand the why, shape the how, and own the what. And they’re not born, and they’re not hired fully formed—they’re developed from within. That’s why I’ve shaped recruiting, mentoring, and promotion frameworks around this role since 2004.

Let AI Change the Workload—But You Change the Org

GenAI is transforming workflows. But the bigger opportunity for you as a Product Leader is to transform responsibilities:

1. Stop having Product Managers carry the tactical burden of writing detailed specs.

2. Remember the power of bringing engineers closer to the customer – as discussed earlier – to cultivate that missionary zeal.

3. Consider how AI's efficiencies can free up capacity to fundamentally restructure your teams for greater impact and strategic alignment.

If you want engineering missionaries, build the system that creates them.

That’s the message I’ll be sharing in my upcoming talk on Product Team Agility in the Age of AI. And thanks again to Swapneel for helping sharpen the message.