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?
The great lie is that society is divided between rich and poor.
The great truth, as David Friedberg puts it, is makers vs takers.
Makers build, create, and deliver real value: houses, software, art, businesses, and everything that moves civilization forward.
Takers watch, criticize, analyze, and politic. They push the lie that the rich hoard unfairly so the poor must seize it… all while positioning themselves to rule the chaos.
As @friedberg tells his kids: “At the end of the day, if you made something and someone else valued it, you were a maker. That was an amazing achievement. That is a great day.”
Takers thrive on division. Makers drive progress.
Time to choose your side.
Adding Assembly AI transcribing to https://t.co/YrLyzPFm0B - just add your api key there (stays local), and enjoy. I found Assembly is much better than OpenAI for correct speaker identification.
Immigrants founded 455 of 775 (59%!) of America’s privately held unicorns.
The collective value of those 455 unicorns is $5T, which is more than the
total market value of companies listed on stock markets in all but 7 countries, including the UK and Germany.🤯
https://t.co/YrLyzPFm0B is a nice browser tool for taking meeting notes without the odd bot joining the meeting.
It records local, transcribes, summarizes the transcript.
No account, no cloud, no bot invite