Abekek Notes

Continuing on that, if you’re a new grad at a Big Tech company (and I’m speaking from my experience at Amazon), it’s extremely hard to be a product owner. You won’t have the reputation or skills when you join. Product owners are usually Principals, Senior engineers, and a minority of mid-level engineers who can shape the product vision, lead development, and explore unknowns. Everyone else is responsible for smaller components where the decisions are already made, and in the era of AI that basically comes down to passing a spec to an LLM and letting it code for you. I got lucky because I joined Amazon at a pretty chaotic time. I was on 4 different teams and products in the span of 2 years, which sounds bad on paper, but it meant I got thrown into situations where things weren’t figured out yet. No clear ownership, no established hierarchy, just problems that needed solving. That’s where I got the chance to actually own a product, and it taught me more than any stable well-structured team would have. So if you’re early in your career, I’d recommend either joining a chaotic Big Tech team that doesn’t have its hierarchy figured out yet, or going to a smaller company like a startup where you can wear many hats and actually shape what gets built.