This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Tanya Melnikova
Not long ago I felt stuck as an engineer. I shipped features, closed tickets, met deadlines… but nothing I did really changed the product. Meanwhile, friends around me were already seniors and principals — and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was missing something.
At first, I thought it was about Leetcode or grinding system design. But then I realized: the people growing fastest weren’t just better coders. They were asking the harder questions:
Why are we building this? Who is it for? How will we know it’s working?
That’s when it hit me — what I lacked was product thinking.
So I built a small Product Thinking Simulator. It’s like a comic you play: short, story-driven scenarios where you face real dilemmas every engineer knows — shipping fast vs. building right, hacking vs. scaling, UX polish vs. technical debt
This is still at a very early stage, and right now I need as much feedback as possible to make it better.
I’d love to know:
- Would you actually use something like this?
- What kinds of dilemmas should I add?
- Do you think product thinking is the real leap from mid-level to senior?
❤️ Any feedback means a lot at this point!
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Tanya Melnikova
Tanya Melnikova | Sciencx (2025-08-27T19:58:27+00:00) From Mid-Level to Senior: Why I Built a Product Thinking Simulator. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/08/27/from-mid-level-to-senior-why-i-built-a-product-thinking-simulator/
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