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?

Brand exploration for OpenAI with Sam Altman, February 2023 Two logo concepts – Circle and Monogram – alongside broader exploration for ChatGPT across brand and product. More details and link below.

“If AI had existed ten years ago, products would not look the way they do today. We need to move beyond chat and create experiences where AI feels native, invisible, and context-aware. This is our role: to imagine the future, and to bring it into the present.”

2. Faster questions: removed the bottom navigation, allowing the app to launch with the keyboard open, making it faster to ask questions.

Observed: The portability of products and people is an essential motion for innovation to thrive in a big company. But this tendency is somewhat counterintuitive for traditional managers that define their success by the number of people on their team. Perhaps the true “entrepreneurs” in big companies don’t hoard and build fiefdoms, they start and handoff - constantly “re-potting” anything that starts growing fast into the right part of the business with the right incentives so the roots go deep?

Truly stellar quarter. Improving step by step. Thanks to all Spotify teams around the world.

when it comes to nailing product-market fit, empathy > passion. too many builders are motivated by vision as opposed to understanding what their customers are actually struggling with (often nuanced, psychological, and surprising). passion is the red herring of product - often yielding results many degrees off.