AI is pushing product, design, and engineering roles together

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 35:42

   A lot of the listeners of this podcast are product managers, they're engineers, they're designers. There's a lot of founders, but there's also a lot of non-founders. There's a lot of people building product that aren't founders. And obviously, a lot of people are worried about where their career is going. Is one of these roles going to disappear? Is one of these roles going to do really well? How do I stay up to date?

2. 36:01

   You're close with a lot of teams, a lot of product teams. What's your sense of just the future of these three very specific roles? Product manager, engineer, designer. This, I think, is a really funny question. So these three roles in particular, obviously, are kind of the central roles for building, you know, for tech companies. So the way I've been describing it is, you know, the concept of the Mexican standoff, right, which is the movie scene where the, you know, the two guys have guns pointing at each other's heads. And then there's, if you watch like John Woo movies, he loves to have, he does the three-way Mexican standoff, where you've got like a triangle, you know, people and like, you know, John Woo movie, they've got, you know, guns in both hands. So they're all, each is aiming at the other two.

3. 36:37

   and you've got this kind of standoff situation. And so the way I've been describing this is there's like a Mexican standoff happening between those three roles, between product manager, designer, and coder, specifically the following, which is every coder now believes they can also be a product manager and a designer, right, because they have AI. Every product manager thinks they can be a coder and a designer, and then every designer knows they can be a product manager, right, and a coder, right?

4. 37:00

   And so people in each of those roles now know or believe that with AI, they don't need the other two roles anymore, right? They can do that because they can have AI do that. And then, of course, there's the real irony, which is all three of them are going to realize that AI can also be a better manager, right? So they're going to aim the guns up the work chart, but that's probably the next phase. And what I think is so fascinating about this Mexican staff is they're actually all kind of correct, I think, right?

5. 37:29

   Which is AI is actually a pretty good, you know, it's actually now a really good coder. It's actually now a really good designer, and it's also a really good product manager. is actually good at doing all three of those things, or at least doing a lot of the tasks involved in those three jobs. And so again, this goes back to this kind of idea of the super empowered individual, where if I'm a coder, like, you know, I mean, step one is like, I need to make sure that I really understand AI coding and like what that means and how coding is gonna change in the future.

6. 37:55

   You know, I need to understand, you know, specifically how to go from being a coder who writes code entirely by hand to being a coder who, you know, orchestrates, you know, a dozen instances of, you know, coding bots. you know, there's a change in the actual job of coding itself, which is happening right now. But the other part of it is, okay, how do I become that super part individual? How do I become a coder that also then harnesses AI so that I can also be a great product manager and I can also be a great designer, right? And then the same thing for the product manager, which is how do I make sure that I can now use coding tools? How do I make sure I can also, you know, do AI-based design?

7. 38:27

   And the same thing for the designer, which is how do I use AI to also become a coder and also to become a product manager. And then what you did is maybe those individual roles changed, like maybe those are not any more sort of stovepipe roles the way that they have been for the last 30 years or whatever. But what happens is that the talented people in any of those roles become super empowered and they become good at doing all three of those things.

8. 38:48

   And then those people become incredibly valuable, because then those are people who can actually build and design new products right from scratch, which is the most valuable thing. And so I think that's the opportunity. I love this answer. So what I'm hearing is essentially, if you're amazing at any of these three roles, you will do well. Number one, if you're amazing at these roles, that's great.

9. 39:10

   But also part of being amazing at these roles is also being able to fully harness the new technology, right? So if you're a master coder today and you don't ever get to the point where you figure out how to use AI to leverage your coding skills and do more, right? Like at some point you are going to hit an issue, right? Here's another way economists talk about this, which is there's the concept of the job, but the job is not actually the atomic unit of what happens in the workplace. The atomic unit of what happens in the workplace is the task. And then the way the economists think about it is a job is a bundle of tasks. And everybody wants to talk about job loss, but really what you want to look at is task loss, right? Tasks changing. I mean, the classic example of task changing was once upon a time, executives never used typewriters or personal computers themselves,

10. 40:01

    right? You know, if you were a vice president of a company in 1970 or whatever, you did not have like a typewriter or a computer on your desk typing things. You had a secretary who you dictated memos to, right? And then there was this change where like email started to show up. And what would happen was the job of the secretary then went from, you know, it went from, you know, the job of the secretary changed for sending out letters with stamps on them to like sending or receiving emails with the other admins. And then the secretary would print out the email and bring into the executive's office.

11. 40:27

    The executive office would read the email and paper, scroll the reply, and give that message back to the secretary, who would go back and type it into the computer on his or her desk and send it as an email. Fast forward to today, none of that happens. Now executives just do all their own email. They still have secretaries or admins, but they're now doing different tasks. You know, they're travel planning and orchestrating events and, like, doing all these other things, you know, that, you know, the great admins do.

12. 40:53

    And then the task set, ironically, of the executive has expanded to do actually more of the clerical work themselves, actually sit there and type their own memos, which again, 50 years ago, they never would have done that. And so the executive job still exists, the secretary job still exists, but the tasks have changed. And I think that's a great example of what's going to happen in coding. The tasks are going to change.

13. 41:14

    It's what's going to happen in product management. The tasks are going to change. Designer tasks are going to change. And so the job persists longer than the individual tasks. And then as the tasks change enough, then that's when the jobs change. And so at the level of an individual, you kind of want to think of like, okay, I have this job. The job is a bundle of tasks. I need to be really good at making sure that I can swap the tasks out.

14. 41:38

    I can really adapt, use the new technology, get really good at AI coding, for example. And then you want to kind of add skills. I can also get really good at design. I can also get really good at product management because I've got this new tool. So you want to kind of pick up more and more scope as you do that. And then, you know, 10 years from now, is your job title coder or coder designer product manager? Or is it just I build products? Or is it just I tell the AI how to build products? It's like, whatever that whatever that job is called, who even knows what it's going to be, but it's going to be incredibly important because the people doing that job are going to be orchestrated in the AI. And so that's the track that the best people are going to be on. And I think that's the thing to lean hard into. I think people aren't

15. 42:17

    fully grasping just specifically software engineering and how much that is changing.