New Roles in the Age of AI Development

I saw Boris's tweet with an interesting thought, which we have been steadily discussing lately in AI chats: as development, product management, design, analytics and other roles begin to mix, the usual job titles are getting worse and worse at conveying what they actually do a person in a team is engaged.

Boris writes that it is quite possible that future product teams will be described not so much in terms of features, but rather in terms of the type of contribution that a person brings at a particular moment in the life of a product.

As a result, the team of the future might look something like this:

Prototyper - quickly finds new ideas, collects many drafts and experiments. Most of them do not reach sales, but this is where new directions are born.

In the current world, this is one of the most important types of employees because speed is now more important than ever.

Builder (my favorite type) - turns an idea or prototype into a working product. What has been called "vibecoding" for the past year has long evolved into agent programming, and builder is the role that most exploits multiple agents.

Sweeper - simplifies the interface, cleans the code, removes unnecessary stuff, optimizes performance and reduces system complexity.

Development with the help of AI, on the one hand, greatly speeds up the process, and on the other hand, without proper attention, it creates a large amount of unnecessary and bad code.

Grower - takes an already launched product and iteratively improves it, strengthening product-market fit.

Maintainer - is responsible for a mature system. Works with the security, reliability, efficiency and scalability of the system itself.

Yes, all these roles overlap, but what I like about this model is that it is not strictly tied to a profession. A designer can be a strong builder or sweeper. Engineer - grower or maintainer. An analyst is not only a person with pages in Confluence, but a participant zero-to-one in the search or optimization of a mature product.

It will still be some time before teams start transforming across the board, but it's worth recognizing that all these new types will likely not be permanent on the team. Depending on the stage of development, it may be something like this:

• new product before PMF: more prototyper + builder + sweeper;
• growing product after PMF: builder + sweeper + grower;
• mature product with strong PMF: sweeper + grower + maintainer.

Who would you consider yourself to be now?