If you ship a feature and never click through it yourself, this episode is for you. Kent talks with Rita Kozlov, VP of Product for Cloudflare's developer platform, about the line between product managers and product engineers, why ownership still matters when prototypes look real, and how far upstream an engineer should insert themselves.
They cover holding the pager vs throwing away a prototype, sitting in customer calls until someone will not click the button, primitives vs paved paths, and what to do when your PM is running a feature factory.
- (00:00) - Meet Rita Kozlov
- (01:36) - Engineering taste in a PM role
- (04:05) - Where PM and product engineer blur
- (07:53) - You are not holding the pager
- (09:48) - What AI changed on both sides
- (13:40) - Sit in the user's seat
- (17:04) - The art of the possible
- (18:53) - Trade-offs and why not both
- (23:22) - Primitives vs paved cow paths
- (26:43) - Insert yourself upstream
- (29:40) - When the PM is a feature factory
- (33:17) - Deep-stack work still reaches users
- (37:58) - Homework: go use the product
Rita Kozlov is VP of Product for Cloudflare's developer platform - Workers, KV, Pages, and the rest of the stack Kent uses constantly. She started as a software engineer, and that background shows up in the details: taste for developer experience, intuition for patterns that do not sit right, and a refusal to treat implementation as someone else's problem.
A major theme is how AI blurred the PM and engineer line. Prototypes are worth a million words, and they create a temptation to ship the facade. Rita's reminder to her product team: you are not the one holding the pager. Accountability is not about having someone to call at 2 a.m. It is about living with the code for the next two years. Product engineers close that gap by translating implementation trade-offs, filling the holes a PRD will never list, and sitting in the user's seat - including the customer call where nobody clicks the button.
They also get into Cloudflare-shaped product judgment: most doors swing both ways if you wait; early customers are worth delaying a launch for; primitives can serve many jobs, and sometimes you still pave a cow path. Rita wants PMs to define the problem, not the solution. Engineers should get closer to customers, challenge a feature-factory PM with why, and remember that even work deep in the stack - cache, TTL, the interface between systems - is user experience.
Homework is basic on purpose: go use the product, including the feature you just shipped, and push it before you throw it over the fence.
Homework
- Use the product you work on this week - not as a demo path, as a real user.
- After you ship a feature, try it in the different modalities and push the limits before you hand it off.
- Write down what you found that you would have missed from the ticket alone.
Resources
Guest: Rita Kozlov
Host: Kent C. Dodds
See on Epic Product Engineer
