Faire made engineers own the full product loop
Most engineering orgs split the work into three lanes: engineers code, product managers decide what to build, designers figure out how it looks. Faire decided that model was too slow and collapsed the lanes.
The company developed what it calls product builders: engineers who own coding, product thinking, and design thinking for a feature from start to finish. The goal was to reduce how often engineers had to wait on a PM or a designer before moving forward.
The early results, according to Faire, showed significant improvement in engineers’ contributions to customer outcomes, with a notable increase in product and design thinking capabilities across the team.
The operator implication here is straightforward. If your small team has engineers who hand off decisions to a PM layer before writing a line of code, that handoff is costing you speed. Faire’s model is a bet that a well-rounded engineer who understands the customer problem ships better and faster than a specialist waiting for permission. For indie teams and small startups, this is already how most people work out of necessity. The interesting question is whether it holds as a deliberate practice at Faire’s scale.
I’m founder of BizStack at Cagri Sarigoz LLC and a passionate advocate for entrepreneurs.
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