About Nick

I've spent my career somewhere between product, engineering, and customers.

I've worked as a software engineer, solutions engineer, and in product-focused roles. That combination has shaped how I think about building software: the best products come from people who understand both the customer problem and the realities of building a solution.

Over time, I've become increasingly interested in what happens when we reduce the distance between those disciplines.

At Docket, I had the opportunity to help define and build out a new Product Engineering role and operating model. The idea was straightforward: give engineers greater ownership of the problems they were solving—not just the tickets or technical implementation handed to them.

That meant expanding the engineer's role beyond traditional development. Product Engineers were expected to develop a deeper understanding of customers, participate more directly in product discovery and solution design, and take greater ownership of outcomes from problem to implementation.

Building that model reinforced something I had been seeing throughout my career: many of the traditional boundaries between product management and engineering are becoming increasingly fluid.

And now, AI is accelerating that shift.

The ability to research, prototype, design, and build software is becoming dramatically more accessible. Product managers can become more technical. Engineers can move further into product discovery and decision-making. Small teams—and increasingly individuals—can take an idea much further across the product development lifecycle than they could before.

That raises a much bigger question than simply:

How do we add AI to our product?

The question I'm increasingly interested in is:

How should we change the way we build products because AI exists?

I'm currently researching that question through hands-on experimentation and conversations with product and engineering leaders.

That research is contributing to an upcoming book exploring the future of the AI-First Product Development Lifecycle—including how AI may change the roles, skills, processes, and operating models behind modern software development.

I'm particularly interested in the emergence of new models like Product Engineering, AI-enabled product development, and what happens when the traditional boundaries between product, design, and engineering begin to disappear.

I don't believe anyone has the complete playbook yet.

But I believe we're in the middle of building it.