Stakeholder empathy, UX, and durable product skills — product engineering with Jamon Holmgren

Kent talks with Jamon Holmgren about product engineering from a long-running consultancy lens: how working with clients, stakeholders, and non-technical users sharpens your product sense, and why those skills matter even more as implementation gets cheaper with AI.

They cover React Native, consulting, game design, stakeholder failures, feedback loops, and what software builders need to keep learning as the job shifts up the stack.

Jamon brings a useful mix to this conversation: founder of Infinite Red, longtime consultant, React Native specialist, and now indie game developer. That perspective makes the episode unusually practical. He has spent years watching where projects go wrong when product thinking is weak: bad requirements, unclear stakeholder alignment, UX details nobody owned, and engineers optimizing the wrong thing too early.

The thread through the whole episode is durability. Product engineering is not just about shipping faster with agents or getting better at a specific tool. It is about understanding people, shaping better requirements, recognizing when the human side of the workflow matters more than the code, and making decisions that keep paying off as the technology changes around you.

Homework

• Sit down with a non-technical person and watch them try to use a feature you built.
• Write down every hesitation, workaround, double-click, or confusing step you notice, then use that list to reprioritize what you fix next.

Resources

• Infinite Red
• Jamon Holmgren — site
• Night Shift Agentic Workflow
• Gunship Origins on Steam

Guest: Jamon Holmgren

• Company: Infinite Red
• GitHub: @jamonholmgren
• 𝕏: @jamonholmgren

Host: Kent C. Dodds

• Website: kentcdodds.com
• 𝕏: @kentcdodds
• GitHub: @kentcdodds
• YouTube: Kent C. Dodds
• Podcast: epicproduct.engineer

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