Almost nobody is PDE

My LinkedIn headline reads “Product Strategist and Design Engineering Leader.” Six words. I have rewritten them more times than I want to admit and they still do not say the thing.

The problem is that they are prose, and prose cannot weight.

There is a job circulating now that nobody has settled a name for. Vercel calls it design engineer. The AI labs post it as product designer, then write a code requirement into the description. The pitch is the same every time: a person who can carry a problem from human need through interaction design into production code without a handoff. Three capabilities, one person. Call it PDE.

The demand is real. The job is real. Almost nobody is actually PDE.

Because the title assumes three capitals. Product, design, and engineering, all at depth, in one person. That person exists, and they are rare enough that a hiring market formed around finding them. Everyone else is a permutation.

pDe. PDe. PdE. Pde. pdE. pDE. pde.

Capital means you can be held accountable for it. Lowercase means you can do it, with help, and you know the difference.

We have had language for this since 1991, when David Guest went looking for what he called the Renaissance Man of computing and drew a T. IDEO turned it into T-shaped people. Harvard Business Review made it T-shaped managers in 2001. Then I-shaped, Pi-shaped, comb-shaped, M-shaped, X-shaped, and a scattering of papers underneath all of it.

Every one of those describes topology. Depth here, breadth there. Two peaks, several peaks, one deep spike. Not one of them tells you which domains.

That is the gap I keep falling into. T-shaped says I have depth somewhere. It does not say where, and where is the only part that matters when somebody is deciding what room to put me in.

I am PDe.

Product is capital because I have been the one answering for it. The roadmap, the framework the teams built against, the call on what ships. Never under that title, which is part of why I needed the notation.

Design is capital because it is where I came in and I can still be the last line on whether something is good.

Engineering is lowercase, and this is the part I want to be exact about, because the temptation to round it up is enormous right now.

I read codebases before I design. I ship applications by myself. I have taken a product from nothing to a public beta with no engineer on it. And I execute based on what the back end tells me is there. When the stack breaks at two in the morning, the accountability sits with the tooling and not with me. That is an e. It is a real e, and it is not an E.

That distinction is doing all the work now, and it is the only reason the notation survives contact with this year.

Access got cheap. Anyone with a coding agent can produce a working front end this afternoon, and it will run. If capital letters meant access, everybody would have three capitals by Christmas and the notation would be worth nothing.

So capital does not mean can you do it. It means can you be the one who answers for it.

Mine have moved, and not in the direction I would have guessed.

I came in through design and kept ending up further upstream, which turned a lowercase p into a capital one slowly, over about a decade, mostly by being in rooms where nobody had written the definition yet.

The e is moving now, and that is more recent. I run a small studio with two products in it, and building them alone has pushed me further into the material than any job did. Not because the tools did it for me. Because the tools let me get close enough to the thing to find out what I did not know.

Which cuts against the version of this argument I expected to make. I assumed agents would absorb execution and my letters would drift down toward Pde. The opposite happened. Access moved me toward the E.

Here is what I am least sure about, and it is not a small doubt.

If the letters move that fast, the notation might describe a moment instead of a person. Mine changed twice in a year, in both directions. A shape that has to be redrawn every six months is either an honest instrument or a useless one, and I do not know yet which this is.

What I do know is that six words on a LinkedIn headline never moved at all, and that was not because I stopped changing.

Write your own three letters.

If it takes you more than ten seconds, that is the finding. And if you round one of them up, you already know which one.

Hew Suber has spent eighteen years building decision-heavy product systems at Meta, Pinterest, Opendoor, and CNN. He now builds at humancommons.studio.

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