Changing Roles in Software Development

A year ago, this role barely existed. Now I'm seeing it everywhere. I call them 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀. They're not product managers. They're not engineers. They're not designers. They're something new: people who can take an idea from concept to working software, end to end, in hours rather than weeks. I became one by 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁. I hadn't written production code in ten years. Then I started building thredspan with AI tools. Now I plan features, write PRDs, write code, run tests, do QA, and handle basic design decisions. All as one person and none of it is hand-written. The thrill of planning a feature and seeing it fully working, demoable, in under a couple hours is hard to describe. This isn't just happening to me. Satya Nadella took over product management for Copilot himself. Not as oversight. Hands-on, in the details, running weekly meetings with engineers. Shopify now requires AI usage in prototyping. PMs are expected to build rough versions themselves. The boundaries between roles are dissolving. And yet most companies are still hiring like it's 2019. Separate job specs for product managers and engineers. Clean divisions that made sense when building software required specialised teams at every step. Those divisions are becoming expensive fictions. The companies that figure this out will move faster than their competitors. The ones that don't will wonder why their roadmaps take quarters when others ship in weeks. If you're a founder, look at your org chart. If you're a PM who can't prototype, or an engineer who doesn't think about product, the gap is going to get uncomfortable. This shift is happening faster than most people realise. 📣 Next month we will be putting out a role to hire our second Product Builder (to work with me 👋). Follow us on thredspan to be notified when new roles come up.

A decade ago, the boundary between Product Management and Engineering was very clear. Product managers focused on requirements, roadmaps, customer conversations, and prioritization. Engineers focused on system design, architecture, and building software. There was some overlap, but it was thin and deliberate. That separation made sense at the time. In today’s AI-driven world, that boundary is fading fast. With modern AI tools and vibe coding workflows, getting a working POC no longer requires weeks of detailed handoffs. Ideas can move from concept to something tangible in days, sometimes hours. In the past, a typical flow looked like this. A product manager wrote a PRD. Engineers interpreted it. The first real output appeared after multiple sprints. Feedback loops were slow and expensive. Today, the workflow is very different. Using AI-assisted coding, agents, and scaffolding tools, I can explore ideas end to end. I can think through the customer journey, define feature behavior, prototype logic, and validate feasibility early. Many assumptions get tested before formal engineering cycles even begin. This is completely changing the nature of the role. Product managers are no longer limited to conceptual ownership. They are increasingly shaping solutions at a technical level. Engineers, in parallel, are deeply involved in product decisions from day one. This is how Product and Engineering roles are blending into a Product and Engineering role. From my own experience, the technical depth I can reach today in AI product work is far deeper than before. I still need to understand product vision, customer journeys, and core product management fundamentals. But I also need to engage with architecture, model behavior, orchestration patterns, and system-level tradeoffs. AI tools make this possible. They compress learning curves and shorten feedback loops, but they also raise expectations. Staying shallow is no longer an option. Looking ahead, I see the intersection of Product and Engineering growing significantly. Over time, we may end up with thinner layers of dedicated Product roles and dedicated Engineering roles, with a much larger core where both blend together. I write about #artificialintelligence | #technology | #startups | #mentoring | #leadership | #financialindependence   PS: All views are personal Vignesh Kumar

Five roles are quietly collapsing into one. Product Manager. Business Analyst. UX. QA. Developer. (And the “herder” in the middle: Project Manager.) For 20+ years, we treated these like fixed cast members in a play. BA discovers + writes the story UX draws the scenes Dev builds the set QA breaks it (lovingly) PM keeps everyone from throwing chairs at each other 😄 Now AI walked into the room… and the roles started melting. At Incepteo and while building Stratpilot.ai and Grow Beyond Borders, I’m watching something strange and exciting: A Business Analyst… …is doing discovery calls, shaping requirements, and prototyping UX with tools like Relume, Lovable, Replit + the usual LLM stack. A QA who used to “wait for a build”… …now understands the system well enough to suggest flows, test strategies, edge cases, even lightweight prototypes. A developer who relied on UX + BA + QA… …can now do all three if they have the curiosity and the communication muscle. And project managers? Many are becoming part orchestrator, part analyst, part product thinker—because AI gives them access to “doing”, not just “tracking”. So what do we call these people? We’ve been thinking of terms like: - AI-native software engineer - AI product developer - Full-stack product engineer - Product-minded engineer - Builder-analyst (my personal guilty pleasure 😅) - Outcome engineer (focus on results, not job titles) But I don’t think this is just “role merging”. I think it’s a return to something stronger. In a startup, you don’t have the luxury of all 5 specialists to fix a problem. You have someone who cares enough to figure it out… and the team fills the gaps. AI is making modern teams feel more stronger again. One big caveat though: - Production quality still needs great engineers + DevOps/DB folks. That doesn’t magically disappear. It gets more important, not less. So I’m genuinely curious: What are you calling these merged roles in your company? And if you had to name the “new” role that blends product + UX + QA + coding… what would you call it? (Asking because I suspect job titles are about to look very different in the next 24–36 months.)

Figma just dropped a study that explains why the edges of your role keep dissolving. They surveyed 1,199 U.S. product and marketing professionals this year. ↳The results show something big is happening behind the scenes: People are doing more, faster, with less clarity around where one role ends and another begins. "As the market adapts to new tools that enable faster iteration cycles, product teams are wrestling with evolving role boundaries that bring traditional titles into question." Workflows are more fluid and cross-functional, blurring lines and speeding up delivery. ↳Role shift: ➤Most professionals now identify with ~3 roles. ➤64% wear two or more hats. ➤PMs, marketers, and project managers are skewing generalist; developers and researchers stay deep and narrow. ➤The design process? Everyone’s in it now. 56% non-designers are doing at least one design-centric task. That’s good for speed. But it creates more overlap, more ambiguity, more need for coordination. Context switching is brutal. ↳Main Takeaways: ➤ AI is the #1 driver of change (72% say AI tools reshaped their role). ➤ Time spent collaborating with AI rose from 11% → 19%. ➤ Multi-hat reality: responsibilities are up 19% YoY; only 36% identify with a single role; average scope spans 2.75 roles. ➤ 57% of developers now prototype moderately to significantly. ➤ Collaboration > handoffs: 56% report more cross-functional collaboration; teams work in parallel, not linear phases. ➤ Tool sprawl is real: product builders juggle 7.6 tool types on average. ↳Leadership's playbook: ➤ Redesign roles for generalist collaboration + specialist depth; update career ladders to match reality. ➤ Codify "AI as colleague” (prompt playbooks, sources, etc.). ➤Move from handoffs to parallel workflows on a shared stack; reduce tool friction. ➤ Use time saved to shift into high-value work (vision, roadmaps); 57% already are. ➤ Build capability: fund AI + craft upskilling; stand up guilds/rotations; keep a single source of truth (design system + shared backlog). The game has changed. This is your edge.

Is software engineering dead? No! The narrative of "AI will kill software engineering" doesn't hold up. But the job is changing — and that part is absolutely true. The role is moving up the stack. Routine code generation, boilerplate, and bug hunting are increasingly handled by AI tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code. So, what are software engineers doing now? They are being asked to do more sophisticated work, not less work. The type of tasks engineers spend more time on is shifting toward designing and architecting solutions, eliciting requirements, evaluating application performance, and engineering work on systems that operate in more complex environments. AI-related and full-stack roles are ascending — and problem-solving, communication skills, and domain knowledge remain highly valued, consistent with the idea that AI can produce code, but not necessarily handle broader software lifecycle tasks. The engineers who will thrive in the next decade are those who use AI to amplify their thinking — not those who wait to see if the tools replace them. You're not competing with AI. You're competing with engineers who know how to use AI well. Onward!! #hiringtrends #jobmarket #students #college #highschool #candogram

He'd been the fastest developer on the team for nine years. Last quarter, a mid-level with half his experience outshipped him three to one. She wasn't a better coder. She'd quietly changed what her job was. Rachel started using AI agents the way a good manager uses a team: delegate predictable work, provide context, review output, redirect when something drifts. Agents handled integrations, test coverage, docs. She focused on architecture and judgment calls between what agents produced and what the system needed. Still an IC on the org chart. Her daily work looked like management. David coded line by line. Nine years of it. Genuinely good. He'd see no IDE on her screen and assume she was slacking. Then sprint reviews told a different story. Rachel shipped three features in a cycle where David closed four tickets. Not because she was smarter. Because she'd changed the ratio between thinking and typing. His response is one I hear constantly: "That's not real engineering." I get it. If you built craft through your hands for a decade, watching someone achieve more by orchestrating feels like a violation. Not just a career concern. An identity one. But stripped of hype, here's what's happening. The IC role is shifting from production to orchestration. From writing every line to directing, reviewing, and integrating work AI produces. The skills this demands aren't new. They're management skills. Providing context. Reviewing with judgment. Knowing when to intervene. Maintaining quality when production outpaces review. Every engineer is becoming a manager. Not of people. Of systems that produce at a pace no human can. The IC track isn't dying. It's evolving. More judgment. More context. Less typing. More thinking. For engineers willing to make that shift, it's the best version of the job they've had. ♻️ Repost if your role is quietly shifting from building to orchestrating ➕ Follow me (Phillip R. Kennedy) for more on the real AI shift in technical work

Cursor 3 shipped this week — and it's no longer a code editor. It's an agent orchestration platform. Developers now manage fleets of AI agents working in parallel. That's not an incremental upgrade. It's a signal. The developer role is bifurcating in real-time. On one side, "hands on keyboard" engineers who use AI to write better code faster. On the other, "agent orchestrators" who define intent, review output, and manage parallel workstreams they'd never have the bandwidth to touch manually. The second group ships dramatically more. Not because they're better engineers — because they're operating at a fundamentally different altitude. Most engineering orgs aren't structured for this. They measure lines of code, PRs merged, sprint velocity. None of that captures the orchestrator. The biggest shift in how software gets built since agile is happening right now — and most leaders are still optimizing for the old model. #AISoftwareDevelopment #DeveloperProductivity

#AI is not replacing #developers evenly. It is coming first for the code-only version of the job. Boilerplate code. Routine tests. Simple bug fixes. Ticket execution. Predictable implementation work. That work is being compressed. But the real story is bigger than #coding. AI #agents are changing the #software system itself. It is no longer just code, #APIs, tests, and deployments. It now includes prompts, context, memory, tools, workflows, controls, evaluations, escalation paths, audit trails, and #governance. That means the #developer #job is being redesigned. The code-output developer asks: “Can AI help me finish this ticket faster?” The agentic #engineer asks: “Should this behavior exist, how should it be controlled, and how will we know when it fails?” That is the new #career divide. The future belongs to #engineers who can turn judgment into infrastructure. I wrote more in this Medium article: 👉 https://lnkd.in/gb5Vpc5u #AgenticEngineering #AIAgents #SoftwareEngineering #DeveloperJobs #FutureOfWork #AIEngineering #AIGovernance #EnterpriseAI #Upskilling #Reskilling #AEI #Programmers #SoftwareEngineers #CXO #Executives #AITrends