Last week I was talking with someone who wants to get into product — I always think I’m a bad person for that, since I’m a bit of a pessimist — and I reached a point I had never reached so clearly: the disciplines of product and UX have never been so important.
Let me explain. It’s not just coding that has become more accessible, but every area of a product/engineering team — and of most professions, cough cough. I’ve been watching videos of senior engineers saying they no longer read code, yet they keep doing a lot of software engineering. I think the same is happening with product/UX. I left data science out of this, since I never went very deep as a data scientist.
Some examples I’ve lived through recently:
- When people say “Man, this feature already exists!”, what I hear is “the UX is so bad that people can’t find it”;
- “We launched it, explained it, and nobody is using it” — what I hear is “what a crappy onboarding we’re doing; the pain people had isn’t big enough to change their behavior”;
- “We’re building features super fast, but they don’t reach production” — what I hear is “we’re running ‘hackathons’ to see if it sells, and if it does, we’ll scramble to catch up… BUUUUT we’re not building features. Product discovery needs product in people’s hands”;
- The ops folks are putting good things into production — not necessarily the best ones — because they feel the pain and build to solve it. Why do I say not necessarily the best? They usually don’t try to widen the view and understand the problem from other angles.
These are just a few cases I’ve been through lately, and I can see how my product experience fits into this new world of coding agents and product teams trying to find their place.
Originally written in Portuguese and published on LinkedIn on October 27, 2026. I translated it into English with the help of AI (Claude): it let me bring my LinkedIn posts to people who don’t read Portuguese without rewriting each one from scratch. I reviewed the translation to keep my original meaning and tone.