Direct the ship, don’t row it
Key Takeaways
With the rise of AI, this article presents a counterargument to the common market view that the roles of product managers (PMs), designers, and engineers are converging into a single “AI builder”: it argues that this is not role convergence, but role expansion.
Especially in mid-to-large organizations, it emphasizes that rather than spending time directly coding (rowing the ship), PMs and designers create far more value by providing vision and context so that teams with dramatically increased productivity can head toward the right destination (steering the ship).
Main Points
1. Roles are not converging, but “expanding”
- Misconception: AI will erase the boundaries between PM, design, and engineering and merge them into a single “AI builder.” (This may be valid for startups or small teams.)
- What is actually happening: The area (circle) of each discipline is getting larger. PMs will more broadly encompass prototyping and strategy, and designers will more broadly span product strategy and system building.
2. The explosion in engineering productivity and the role of PM/design
- Thanks to AI, engineers’ productivity has increased dramatically, but the resulting bottleneck arises from direction on what to build and why.
- For a PM in an engineering organization with a 1:40 ratio, writing code directly does not solve the bottleneck.
- The real job of PMs and designers is not to execute everything themselves, but to build a shared brain that helps the entire team have shared context and judgment.
3. Product engineers exist
- Product engineers who do not simply write the code they are told, but understand the product’s “why,” are the original form of the AI builder that has existed from the beginning.
- However, because such talent is rare, for an organization to work well, excellent direction-setting and context-providing are essential.
