I think it's product sense. There have been so many times in working with engineers where I tend to be maybe overly empathetic, if that's possible—at least in the context of building a company. But this is one area where I would feel a little frustrated if someone said, "I don't have an opinion about the product."
When I was managing engineering teams at Affirm, I would ask my engineers: "What's your opinion? What would you build?" Maybe that seems counterintuitive in a corporate context of, "Just tell me what to build."
That last piece of the process we've relied on so much in this industry pre-AI is someone's creative energy. It's the most costly thing—it can get us into rabbit holes, and it can get us into dark places at times because we give so much of ourselves. But it is very important for us to tap into that safely, and use that tool to our advantage in this market.
One question to ask yourself is: What does it mean to tap into my creative energy safely? And what does it mean for me to have an opinion about a product? A great place to start is to look at the software products you already love, and figure out why you love them. Dissect them, and reverse engineer the product a bit.
I think that is going to be a critical, must-master skill to survive in this transition into an AI world where the only thing we really have left is what makes us human—what makes us understand when something feels right. That is one of the most valuable things we have left, and so we need to over-index on that and bring that to the forefront as engineers.