Shadowing Practice: Introducing Become an Epic Product Engineer - Learn English Speaking with Video

What is up everybody?

My name is Kent C.

Dodds, and this is Become an Epic Product Engineer podcast.

For the last 10 plus years, I've been teaching software developers how to build quality user experiences, primarily on the web.

And with the changing landscape of AI coding assistance, I am excited to introduce this new podcast series to help you learn the durable skills

that you can still use

and will continue to be able to use even as AI kind of takes over implementation from what we've typically been doing.

So yeah, software is changing.

AI is accelerating what was already true for even like 50 years ago.

One of the most valuable skills that you could have as a software developer is product engineering,

understanding users, their problems, and shipping what actually solves those user problems.

So yeah, sure, like quality, craft, review still matters, but agents are getting better at those things.

And so rapidly, the unique thing that we used to be able to provide,

which was coding, is sort of being eaten and taken over by AI.

And frankly, I love that.

I think it's awesome that we can spend more of our time really understanding the problem

and targeting what exactly our users actually need.

I like to think of it as the fact that, or the idea, the metaphor that we are all archers.

We've got this quiver of arrows and we've gotten really, really good at aiming at a target and letting go of the arrow,

letting it fly and hitting the target despite wind and other concerns.

But these arrows have been improving at a rapid pace with AI.

And so now they're less like arrows and more like homing beacons.

And yes, they don't always hit the target exactly right.

And you do have to be skilled at using these arrows.

But I am not very confident in my ability to predict

the future of what the ceiling is for these AI agents and how far or fast we're going to get there.

And so I think let's look at what the durable skill is.

And I think that is understanding what we are to build.

We've got so many targets that we could aim these arrows at.

And in fact, with as good as these arrows have gotten, we can hit other targets that we never even noticed before,

because now we just have these capabilities that we didn't really have before.

Lots of things have changed.

And so knowing what to build, that is what we're going to be talking about in this podcast series.

So the idea here is

that I want to learn out loud with the people who blend their technical depth and expertise with product judgment.

So these will be people that you have definitely heard about and people that you haven't heard about.

Founders, researchers, engineers, product managers who've kind of lived on both sides of things.

And we've already got, at the time I'm recording this, we've already got like a ton of episodes that I'm excited for you to dive into.

So yeah, I know like a lot of you engineers are worried about, oh man, like does AI mean that I'm just going to become a product manager now?

No, I actually don't think that that is the case.

Product managers are super valuable, but developers and their engineering experience and expertise is still super valuable.

And there is a distinction between what a product manager does and what a product engineer does.

But the fact is that a traditional software development

or software developer who's been doing this for a long time

does need to kind of adopt some of the mindset and the ideas that we typically associate with product manager.

Empathy for the user, developing clarity around a problem space so we can decide what solution to implement.

And then even identifying whether the problem is the right problem versus a beautifully wrong solution.

And I think that a lot of us can relate to that kind of thing.

So the through line here is that the mission here is I want to teach you durable skills.

I want to give you product thinking, not just code.

I want you to fall in love with the problem and not your solution.

as exciting as it is to develop really awesome solutions.

The real goal here is to get really good at understanding

that problem so that you can find a solution

that does a really good job solving that problem and maybe many other problems.

So we'll talk about like the problem tree and taking a step back and like, what is this problem actually?

So each episode, you're going to have a specific thing that you can do.

I call this the homework.

And the goal of that is just to get you actually doing stuff.

Now, you can definitely watch the episode and or listen to the episode

and learn a lot and just kind of have it,

you know, you can kind of marinate in that wisdom that these guests are sharing with us and from their experience.

But I think that actually taking action is where you're going to get a lot of value out of this.

And so at the end of every episode, I hope that you take the opportunity to jot down the homework and look for an opportunity to implement that,

whether that be read this book or talk to this person or whatever.

So I just want to kind of give you a sense for what you can expect here.

So a couple of specific episodes that already exist in the podcast series that I want to call out.

So Dax Rad actually was one of the people who inspired

me to start this podcast series in the first place

because he just comes out with these really great ideas of what it means to be a product engineer

and to build an actual product.

So he was the first episode and you definitely want to listen to that.

Now in that episode, he talks about how being faster at building the wrong thing is not good.

And actually intentionally adding restraint, which has now been removed because implementation is so fast,

intentionally adding that restraint will help you when like you're just actively putting features in front of users' faces and stuff.

We talk about the onboarding experience and how to avoid the kitchen sink clutter of like a command K sort of experience.

He's building a dev tool.

So that one is a really great episode.

Wayne Allen, also a really awesome episode.

He has some classical training where he's really studied up on what product engineering actually is.

And so we talk about building the right thing before we build the thing right, validate before we fall in love with the idea, that sort of thing.

We've talked about the mom test.

It's really good.

You want to listen to that one for sure.

And Will's episode is also fantastic.

He's got some actual formal training in this area with instructional or with industrial design.

And there are a lot of really interesting crossovers with that.

So don't miss that episode.

Don Norman, the author of The Design of Everyday Things, along with many other books, he's 90 years old.

And he comes on the podcast to talk about his experience over the history.

And he talks about what that user error actually just means that the design and the system has a problem.

and why you really want to watch real people using your software.

And Grady Booch, actually, at the time I'm recording this episode or this intro for you, Grady Booch's episode has not actually been published.

So you can look forward to that episode.

He talks a lot about judgment, architecture, what doesn't get automated, what should get automated, that sort of thing.

He actually, that episode happened because I posted something to EpicProduct.Engineer titled The Last Software Engineer,

which is just a metaphor that I use to talk about product engineering and why it's so important.

But he took issue with that title and some of the things that I shared in that post.

And so we have a really nice conversation about the way that he sees the future.

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It's really interesting.

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Alex Hillman, Sales Safari, he's got a really great mind for

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understanding how to engineer desire before you build out a spec

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and how to help people feel anticipated rather than tricked as they're using your software really really good dylan also fantastic episode.

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He talks about making user pain feel painful for you, integrating directly with support and tightening that user feedback loop.

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Really great episode.

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And Aaron Francis, that episode was really great because he's building Solo,

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a software called Solo and talks about his experience as an indie developer building that for development users.

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So we've got that and way, way more.

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So many awesome episodes that I'm excited for you to experience as you go through this podcast series.

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So you don't necessarily need to go things in order.

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The episodes are not linear in any way.

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So just grab whatever episodes you want to.

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If you want to binge the whole thing, that's probably how I would consume this because every one of these episodes is just fantastic.

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I'm not going to publish an episode that isn't fantastic.

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I also ask you to please subscribe.

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And you can actually go to the website, epicproduct.engineer slash become an Epic Product Engineer podcast,

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all with hyphens, or you just look for it on the internet.

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And you can actually submit your email and your name.

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And I will send you an email every week with a summary of an episode.

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And so if you just want that, like constantly in the back of your mind that you're trying to become an Epic Product Engineer,

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then that is a really great way to do that.

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And also on the site, there are episode summaries and the homework is there.

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There's show notes and transcripts and all of that too.

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But yeah, every week you can look forward to getting a new episode on Wednesday.

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One last thing that I wanna mention too is I'm actually also starting a new series

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that is like a solo companion to this where I am creating a series titled Better with Kent,

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where we're all going to get better with Kent.

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And we're going to talk about durable skills that you can develop on that.

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So go search up Better with Kent on your favorite podcast player.

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This will also be a YouTube series.

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And we're going to talk about how you can make yourself a better,

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more useful and value creating individual as a software developer.

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So with that, I'm going to leave you with your homework.

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This is the homework.

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Your homework is to subscribe to the podcast in whatever your favorite podcast player or whatever, and pick one episode, just one that you're going to listen to.

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And if that episode wins you over, then I invite you to come back again and continue to listen to the rest of the episodes.

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So thank you so much for listening to this episode.

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And I'm looking forward to seeing you throughout all of the episodes of the Become an Epic Product Engineer podcast.

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Thank you so much.

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We'll see you around.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing Practice: Introducing Become an Epic Product Engineer - Learn English Speaking with Video

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What is the Shadowing Technique?