How to grow better product vision as engineer?

Great question! Hybridizing as a product manager to develop your product direction is a very common behavior at Meta, so I know a lot about it. First, I recommend going through these discussions that have advice on this topic:

• How can an engineer transition to product manager and do you think there is higher potential to reach VP level at PM?
• "How do I come up with innovative, impactful ideas and bring them to my team?"

Should I grow more engineering domain knowledge or should I take some business courses to further improve myself?

This depends on what stack you work on and what team you're on, but regardless of all that, I highly recommend against taking business courses to develop a sharper sense there. A course by definition needs to be pretty general, but in order to really have a nose for impact and come up with high-leverage efforts, it's all going to be team-specific 99% of the time. It is near impossible to use external resources to get to senior, especially at a FAANG-level company like Snap.

There's 2 major types of projects you can add:

1. Roadmap projects - If you are on a product team, this will mean shipping new features/improving on existing ones (probably via A/B test at a giant company like Snap). To improve your product vision here, I recommend getting to know your PM, using competing products a lot, and looking for trend-lines among past projects.
2. Infrastructure work - If you aren't on a product team, this will be especially relevant, but even product teams will have a lot of standard engineer infra like oncall process, internal tooling, and build ecosystem. For this, it does make sense to develop a deeper engineering domain knowledge of your team's system. Even if you're a product engineer, there's no reason you can't work on infra problems - Rahul has a good example of that in this video on how he built and scaled an internal tool to hundreds of engineers to get E6 (Staff) promo at Meta.

One common misconception about growing as an engineer is that you have to create (and then implement) a compelling vision. I actually think the minority of engineers reach very senior levels in this way.

I'd argue that you need very little product vision to get to a senior+ level. Instead, just observe the problems on the team and solve them.

Don't have an idea of problems within the team? Just ask someone, I'm sure they're happy to complain to you :)

• If you notice an engineer is stuck, ask them if you can help, and see if others are also stuck.
• Talk to the PM and ask if they're happy with the engineering team collaboration, and how it could be better.

I'd strongly advise against taking business courses -- I don't know of anyone where that was actually an effective use of their time or money. I'm biased, but I'd say you'd gain a lot more by being active within the Taro community 💯