Newsletter: The engineeringification of everything

[ivanagas]

Summary

A wave I've been seeing that I think PostHog has been riding of the engineeringification of everything. It looks like this:

1. Domain-specific tools are becoming more powerful, complicated, and more ingrained into business processes. Think products like PostHog (product engineer), customer.io/Relay.app/Zapier (technical marketer), Clay/lemlist/Harmonic (sales engineer), Airbyte/Census/dbt (data engineer), Lovable/v0/Cursor (design engineers)
2. More people need to develop engineering skills to deal with this. People basically accept the call and LLMs help a lot.
3. People are identifying more as engineers (salesops engineer, data engineer, design engineer) or at least identify that as part of their job, which creates demand for more specialized tools.
4. Repeat.

Headline options

The engineeringification of everything

Wait, it’s all engineering?

Outline (optional)

• PostHog is primarily built for engineers.
• We’ve discussed changing the name from Product for Engineers, but I think it is fitting. More people are becoming engineers. There are literally more products for engineers. There are definitely more engineers than product people. Also, engineers can learn product skills much easier than vice versa.
• The engineeringification of everything is a loop. More powerful, domain-specific tools get built, they require people to develop engineering skills to use (whether acknowledged or not), people with those skills identify more as engineers than their own role, repeat.

More powerful engineering tools are built

• For domain specific tools, a common development pattern is a company figures out a process that helps them accomplish a task, they then automate some part of that process, the automation grows and eventually becomes “too big” for the company it is apart of, and split out on their own.
• This happens in engineering, but it happens just as much in non-engineering roles too.
• Examples:
  • https://chatgpt.com/c/692d5a52-8474-8328-ad5a-1a0e59c38e66
  • Pocus (PLG → sales outreach intelligence)
  • Gong (call QA → automated → product)
  • Scratchpad (GTM dashboards → unified workspace)
  • Tactic (capacity spreadsheets → planning tool)
  • Chili Piper (routing scripts → scheduling + assignment)
• Other companies can then get access to this technology, which automates some process for them. The non-engineers want to use it, but it can often be technical to set up and utilize fully.
• They get help, or just figure it out themselves, building engineering skills along the way.
  • LLMs make it way easier to figure these things out. Companies value speed and autonomy, give their team room to figure these out too.

More people have the skills of engineers

• For example, sales has become more about engineering.
  • When I look at what our sales team talks with customers about, it is implementation, limitations, features, understanding how they are building their product.
  • It is less like just about the money or what people you like/networking.
  • Prospecting is becoming increasingly automated. Where in the past you’d need to find in-person or through some lead list or phone book, now you have things like LinkedIn. People used to manually add data about their lead, but more of that is being automated with tools like Clay.
  • Beyond, this they’ve also built a bunch of their own tools like Quotehog.
  • See [salesops engineer spec](https://github.com/PostHog/company-internal/issues/2115)
• Marketing has become more about engineering
  • First, you need to know what engineers want, because more people are engineers.
  • There is an increasing number of marketing tools, like PostHog. Managing content automation pipelines. Onboarding flows. Adding product pages to the website. Docs automations.
• Vibe coding has opened up engineering to more people than ever.
  • It helps a lot that LLMs are making engineering more accessible for everyone. You can automate a lot.
  • A lot more people identify as builders at the very least
  • Agents are sort of a superpowered version of this.

More people identify as engineers

• Repeat these process across multiple domain-specific tools and suddenly you have a ton of domain-specific engineering knowledge. Your role as sort of evolved to be a combination of execution and automation.
• People usually still identify with the old execution focused title until they know any better. For example, after writing “what is a product engineer”, I saw a ton people have a lightbulb moment and identify with that title. They realized these were the things they’ve been doing
• I’ve seen similar things happen with other titles too. Turns out this is happening for a lot of roles.
• “I’m something of a engineer myself”
• You see this in the growth of roles like design engineers, data engineers, GTM engineers, sales engineers. Every function is getting their own set of tools that need to be engineered together and integrated with that function.
• Combine the positive results these tools are having with more people identifying as engineers and you can see where the demand is coming from.
  • There is more customers for
  • They spend more on marketing enforcing the identity.
• Identifying as engineers gives these new tools someone to market to.
  • See something like https://thegtmengineer.substack.com/
• Expect this to continue. PostHog is riding this wave. Become an engineer or get left behind.