Human Resources

For years, tech products got built by three roles: engineers, designers, and PMs. Each owned a bottleneck. It worked, but it was slow.

That's over. An engineer can spin up a decent UI without a design review. A PM can vibe-code a prototype in an afternoon. Nobody's writing 10-page PRDs to get alignment before a single line of code gets written. The pipeline has collapsed. Amazon's two-pizza team rule always made intuitive sense. Now it looks like the only way to operate.

This is shaking people into two camps. There are folks who grabbed onto these tools and are moving at a pace that feels unfair. Roadmaps scoped for a quarter are getting blown through in weeks. Then there are the skeptics, or people who just haven't found their footing yet. The data says the gap is widening in real time.

I'm seeing this play out around me at companies large and small. Roles are melding. The engineer who can design, the PM who can ship code, the designer who can think in systems. The lines that used to define who does what are blurring fast, and expectations are shifting to match.

The wild part is where the ceiling moved. We used to ask "can we build this?" Now we assume yes. Whatever you can dream up, describe, and sketch out, you can probably ship. The question that actually matters is: what should we even be building? What's worth imagining? That's the hard part, and no tool automates your way out of it.

The bottleneck isn't engineering complexity anymore. It's imagination.

I called this with friends back in December 2025 and turns out I was underselling it. The frustrating thing is I have no receipts. Hot takes that occasionally land, and by the time they do I've got nothing to point to. That's a big part of why I'm writing more now. To actually document this stuff as it happens.