We’re in a period where everything feels like it’s getting jumbled up across roles because AI lets you explore the adjacencies of other functions more easily.
We all collectively have to figure out the new form of definition of what these jobs look like in a world of agents, and certainly many will look different from what they did before. But there are some immutable laws that will eventually re-emerge over time and become clear again.
As an example, when you’re scaling, product managers should be spending an insane amount of time with customers and getting feedback on the product and thinking through what to do build next, how to design it so it’s usable, and so on. Engineers should be understanding the business objectives, and building systems that scale and are secure, even as feature velocity increases by 10X. Now both can do a bit more of the others role, and this can temporarily get conflated as doing the whole thing, but eventually the work adds up to be enough that it makes sense to specialize again.
Similarly, in GTM, the product marketer can certainly generate a working design and video for a launch, but the specialist is always going to (or should) have an eye for quality that delivers a better outcome.
My bet is that AI enhances specialization even further, even if a few roles collapse into each other, and the future toolchain and craft of the specialist will be much higher leverage and output far greater than anyone else as a hobbyist in that function.
Lenny Rachitsky@lennysan
Engineers don't write code. PMs are shipping to production. The design process is dead (there's no time). Marketing can ship their own campaigns. SDRs are being replaced by AI. Everyone's a data scientist now. What a time to be alive.
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