Maybe, Your Next Great Product Mind Sits on Your Backend Team!
Most teams miss this. You hire backend engineers for their data chops or system know-how, then wall them off from anything that even smells like frontend. But every so often, someone on the backend team surprises you. They obsess over the user journey in code reviews. They drop sharp, well-argued feedback on the Figma file. They talk about friction and delight.
Too often, that’s where it ends → because they “don’t do frontend”.
I refuse to let that happen on my team. You shouldn’t either…
Spot these people.
Listen when a backend dev flags confusing flows or cares about onboarding speed. That’s not noise. That’s product sense trying to break through. Your job is to open the door.
Start small.
Give them safe, visible frontend tasks—color tweaks, a text fix, a micro-interaction. No pressure. Make their learning official. Add it to sprint goals, their objectives—front-load time for this growth. This is not after-hours homework.
Now pair them up.
The right mentor matters more than the right tutorial. A patient FE dev doing real code reviews and screenshare debugging gets them moving faster than any lonely course.
When you back curious engineers, you build “product engineers”—people who see past the ticket, connect backend to UI, and close the gap between idea and reality.
That’s how you get resilient, user-obsessed teams who ship what matters.
Don’t let product sense go to waste because of a job title.