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?
Yesterday, a frontend engineer told me that they think that modern frontend engineering is more complex than backend engineering these days.
I asked this person if they've done backend engineering recently. They have not: they just had ideas on what it was like, back in the day.
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Revenue and income are NOT the same thing
Costs and expenses are NOT the same thing
Net income and free cash flow are NOT the same thing
Confused? Here's a quick breakdown:
Want to get someone's help?
If you don't know them well, vague asks like these are doomed to fail:
1. Will you chat with me about my career?
2. Will you be my mentor?
3. Will you give me advice on how to improve my work?
Instead, make the asks *specific*... ↓