Prompt Engineering
What is prompt engineering?
Prompt engineering is a specialized skill set and practice area in AI development that involves crafting effective instructions for large language models (LLMs) to achieve desired outputs. Unlike casual prompt writing for personal use in tools like ChatGPT, prompt engineering focuses on creating prompts that work reliably at scale in production AI products—serving thousands or millions of users rather than a single person.
What skills does prompt engineering require?
Prompt engineering requires both technical knowledge and domain expertise:
Technical skills include understanding how different LLM providers prefer different formatting—for example, Anthropic prefers XML while OpenAI prefers Markdown. It also involves techniques like prompt decomposition (breaking complex tasks into smaller steps), orchestration (managing multiple LLM calls), and risk mitigation.
Domain expertise means understanding the specific product context, user needs, and desired outcomes that the prompt needs to address. This is why prompt engineering benefits from cross-functional collaboration between product managers, designers, and engineers. No single role typically has all the necessary skills—product managers bring domain knowledge, engineers bring technical understanding of LLM behavior, and designers contribute user experience perspective.
How does prompt engineering fit into AI product development?
Prompt engineering sits alongside other rapidly evolving AI concepts like RAG (retrieval-augmented generation), agents, tools, and evals. When teams build AI features, they write prompts that must work reliably without giving users multiple tries or extensive trial-and-error.
The challenge is that unlike personal use of ChatGPT where you can iterate until you get the right answer, production prompts need to work correctly the first time for diverse use cases at scale.
Learn more:
- Building My First AI Product: 6 Lessons from My 90-Day Deep Dive
- Building AI Products - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille
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