As engineering, product, design, DS, etc. melt into a new kind of role, I was reflecting on what roles might look like in the future. For example, when I look at the Claude Code team I see what I think is five archetypes:
- Prototyper: comes up with brand new ideas; churns out many ideas, most of which don't ship.
- Builder: quickly turns a prototype/idea into production-grade product/infra.
- Sweeper: cleans up the UI, simplifies the code and system, unships, optimizes performance.
- Grower: takes a product that has been built and iterates on it to improve Product-Market Fit.
- Maintainer: owns a mature system to make it secure, reliable, fast, and efficient as it scales.
Many people span across 2 roles, and sometimes 3 roles. I also notice that these roles are not really tied to job function -- eg. across Anthropic, some designers match category 1, some 2, some 3; same for engineers, PM, DS.
A healthy team needs a mix of these, depending on the product:
- A product that is new and pre-PMF needs people that are strong at 1+2+3
- A product that is growing and has found PMF needs 2+3+4 and some 5
- A product that has strong PMF needs 3+4+5 and some 2
Maybe product roles of the future will look more like this, and less like the domain-specific roles of today?