The real judge will be survivorship bias and as a betting man, I might think product owners are the ones with the entrepreneurial spirit to make it to the other side.

Product owners and project managers have the soft skills to convince the company that they aren't a drain on its resources regardless of what they actually are.

Yeah, but can they out-perform LLMs at soft skills? LLMs are really good sucking up, and telling people what they want to hear.

I've worked for a company which turned from startup to this. Product owners had no clue what they own. And no brain capacity to suggest something useful. They were just taken from the street at best, most likely had relatives' helping hands. In a couple of years company probably tripled manages headcount. It didn't help.

The people who will come out the other side are domain focused people with the engineering chops to understand the system end to end, and the customer skills to understand what needs to be built.

Yes. everyone will eventually have the job title of "problem solver"

Don't forget the very important role of managing the problem solvers--if you just let the problem solvers run amuck all sorts of problems might be solved.

Yeah, if places like RAND or Xerox PARC or the OG Skunkworks, or even Manhattan Project and Apollo Program taught us, is that you cannot let engineers and domain experts run the show, because if you do, they start doing some world-upending shit like putting GUIs on the Moon, or building nukes, or supersonic jets, or inventing new materials that violate the natural order of things, or they generally just rock the boat too much, continuously disrupting the corporate and political pecking order.

Nah, you have to put them in hamster wheels so they keep generating steady value for the shareholders, and put those in open plan offices so they get too mentally exhausted and distracted to try and change things. Throw in free cheese during good economy to keep them happy, but that's strictly optional.

Major Dilbert vibes

As a dev, if you try taking away my product owners I will fight you. Who am I going to ask for requirements and sign-offs, the CEO?

Your architect, principal engineer etc. (one spot-on job title I've seen is "product architect"), who in turn talks to the senior management. Basically an engineer with a talent and experience for building products rather than a manager with superficial understanding of engineering. I think the most ambitious teams have someone like this on top - or at least around

I've had your type of product owner, but I've also had a product owner that was an ex-staff engineer. Companies should hire ex-engineer product owners, not strictly people-manager product owners.

Technical background doesn't always help in my experience - it's just a different role. Creating great product requires deep technical expertise to understand where the cutting edge is, vision to understand how it can be expanded and business expertise to understand what makes sense economically. It's just not a manager's job, you can't perform it by collecting customer requirements in a spreadsheet.

Perhaps the role will merge into one, and will replace a good chunk of those jobs.

E.g.:

If we have 10 PMs and 90 devs today, that could be hypothetically be replace by 8 PM+Dev, 20 specialized devs, and 2 specialized PMs in the future.

If you have 10PMs and 90 devs today, and go to 8 "hybrid" PMs + 2 specialized PMs, you're probably still creating backlog items faster than that team can close them.

So you end up with some choices:

* do you move at the same speed, with fewer people?

* do you try to move faster, with less of a reduction in people? this could be trickier than it sounds because if the frequency of changes increases the frequency of unintended consequences likely does too, so your team will have to spend time reacting to that

I think the companies that win will be the second batch. It's what happens today, basically, but today you have to convince VCs or the public market to give you a bunch of more money to hire to 10x the team size. Getting a (one-off?) chance to do that through tooling improvements is a big gift, wasting it on reducing costs instead of increasing growth could be risky.

A 70% reduction in the labor force of product and engineering has a lot of consequences.

> I think instead we should focus on getting rid of managers and product owners.

Who says companies aren't doing that with AI (and technology in general) already?

Who says they are doing that?

The _instead_ was a key word in my comment. I didn’t say, or imply, they weren’t working on replacing other roles with AI.

it’s obviously intensely correlated: the vast majority of scenarios either both are replaced or neither