the evolution of product building roles with AI coding tools
June 10, 2025
With AI bridging the gap between natural language and programming language, more people beyond engineers have begun contributing to codebases and "vibe coding" — essentially writing code through conversation and iteration rather than traditional programming. As AI models get better, and improvements in code reviews and testing follow, more and more people will prototype, build, and ship new experiences to customers.
This shift in who can code is already changing how product teams work. As a result, I hypothesize there to be a shift in functions and roles in engineering, product, and design teams, initially starting in the tech industry. I believe product management, product design, and product engineering roles are going to merge into a single role — probably called something like "builders" — where they spike across a set of skills that collectively make them effective teams to build amazing products for users.
A simple categorization of these skills might look like:
- Technical architect — understanding systems, data models, APIs, and how to build scalable solutions
- Conceptual architect — thinking about the conceptual system users have to comprehend to use the product, and how every new addition to the product fits into that system, understanding how the system solves the user problems
- Taste maker — setting the bar for high craft and quality in the experiences delivered to users that looks and feels exceptional
These are not mutually exclusive skills — most people will develop strength in one of these, a smaller subset will excel in two of them, and rare individuals will excel in all three of them.
However, I think the benefit of this classification is that there will be more fluidity in what people can do for each project, and even make it easier to pickup new skills before the next project. For one project you might play the equivalent of a product engineer, and for another project play the equivalent of a product designer.
What excites me about this is that people will no longer be rigidly stuck in what their role definition expects of them, likely product manager or designer, but will be able to focus more on how they can contribute to building the best products for their customers, based on what is needed at any given moment.