From Mid-Level to Senior: Why I Built a Product Thinking Simulator

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.

🔗 Try the simulator (beta)

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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!

PS: picture to grab attention

Comments

[viky]

cool,

I stopped playing once I read this line

Remove step entirely, default to Python, preload projects, faster UX, but requires reworking logic and migrating old user data.

python === faster UX lol

[Roberto Antelo]

Would totally use
Also, know that increasing your seniority means knowing how to solve problems using the best technology available, not trying to fit everything into the current stack