I started building my own products in 2018. Since then, those products have reached thousands of people, earned paying customers, and generated real sales.
Most of them are no longer running.
I do not see that as a footnote to hide. It is where much of the useful experience came from.
Shipping widens the job
When you own a small product, writing the software is only one part of the work. You have to decide what to build, explain it clearly, connect payments, deploy it, support users, watch costs, and repair the parts that only fail in production.
There is no clean handoff where the technical responsibility ends and someone else makes the product successful.
That changes how you approach development. A technically elegant feature that creates support problems is not elegant. Infrastructure that nobody can operate is not finished. A polished interface aimed at the wrong problem is still the wrong product.
The value of wider ownership
My depth is still in software, but I now think in outcomes rather than layers.
For a lean team, that means I can move from a fuzzy requirement to product decisions, implementation, integrations, deployment, and iteration without losing the thread between them.
The goal is not to do every specialist’s job. It is to understand the whole system well enough to make good tradeoffs and keep the work moving.
That is the kind of product engineer I want to be: close to the code, but accountable for more than the code.