I see a trend in which, with the latest advancements of AI, the roles of engineers and POs are going to merge on a 1.5- to 3-year horizon, and only those who are willing to expand their scope will make it out.
How do I see that? There’s a pattern I’ve observed more and more around me, it’s engineering managers with the following profile: 7+ direct reports, a highly technical background and technical track record, and has been working in the same industry and domain space for 4+ years.
In the past, with such a number of reports, team knowledge scope size, and amount organizational choirs would mean these people would be at full capacity, and they might push an occasional commit, but that would be a rare occurrence.
But what I’ve witness over the past months is that these profiles have been very prolific with pushing out features, and it has always happened once they got access to an agentic AI harness and frontier model (whichever flavor of Claude or ChatGPT rocks their boat). They have a full scope, they’re busy and often stretched, but yet, they find the time to push features between meetings by figuring out the business problem to solve with stakeholders, directing the AI to write code for them, and verifying manually that the code does deliver the intended business goal.
