What Is a Design Engineer?
Design engineer names two different jobs. This is the software one: what design engineers do, the skills, and how to become one.
11 min readProduct Design, Craft, AI
Writing
Essays on product design, business, and the Rakibulism philosophy — by Rakibul Islam, design engineer and co-founder of Panze LLC. 11 posts.
Topics: Business (7) · Discipline (4) · AI (3) · Product Design (3) · Craft (2) · Philosophy (2) · Strategy (2) · SaaS (1) · RSS
68% of Searches Now End Without a Click
Zero-click search, AI Overviews and llms.txt — what the 2026 data actually shows, what Google says about it, and the work that still counts.
10 min readStrategy, AI, Business
Poverty Loves Indecision
Not deciding never sends a bill, which is exactly why it is the most expensive habit there is — and the research shows it gets harder the less you have.
9 min readDiscipline, Business, Philosophy
The Middle Battle
The stretch after you have started and before anything has worked. No applause, no deadline, no obvious end — and it is where most things quietly die.
5 min readDiscipline, Business
The Interval Between Deciding and Doing
Most plans don't die at the decision or the execution. They die in the gap between them — which is comfortable, looks productive, and has no natural end.
4 min readDiscipline, Business
Nobody Claps While You’re Still Building. That’s the Point.
A carpenter I know spent four months on a single desk. No client, no deadline, no buyer. Just him, a slab of walnut, and a joint he couldn’t get right.
4 min readCraft, Discipline
The Only Way to Build a Business Without Owning Assets
There’s a belief most founders carry without questioning it: to build a real business, you need to own the machine that runs it.
8 min readBusiness, Strategyfirst published on Substack
The Secret of Getting Profit Without Paying the Price
The real reason success takes time — and why your life, treated as a product, makes this suddenly very clear.
2 min readPhilosophy, Businessfirst published on Substack
A hard truth about business most people avoid saying
Most people don’t want to build a business. They want to escape a job. Those are not the same thing — and confusing them is why so many early ventures stall at the exact moment…
2 min readBusiness
What Does a Product Designer Actually Do in the Age of Agentic AI?
Agents are operating several steps ahead of users now. They’re inferring intent, taking actions, making micro-decisions that users never explicitly approved.
5 min readProduct Design, AIfirst published on Substack
Why Most SaaS Products Don’t Fit the Market?
The real problem is the design. Most teams focus on adding features. Too many features make everything slow. Good design is simple.
2 min readProduct Design, SaaSfirst published on Substack