@bcherny: As engineering, product, design, DS, etc. melt into a new kind of role, I was reflecting on what roles might look like …

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:

1. Prototyper: comes up with brand new ideas; churns out many ideas, most of which don’t ship
2. Builder: quickly turns a prototype/idea into production-grade product/infra
3. Sweeper: cleans up the UI, simplifies the code and system, unships, optimizes performance
4. Grower: takes a product that has been built and iterates on it to improve Product-Market Fit
5. 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?

Totally agree. Roles often change over time/project

When I look at Anthropic, we have a mix of DS archetypes also. Some DS are really good at zero-to-one projects, some are great at optimizing mature systems, etc. What is interesting is these archetypes do not seem to be specific to engineering.

Claude can help with all of these to varying extents, and will improve over time. Agree that Sweeper/Builder Claude is quite good at today.