I’ve been spending a lot of time on the road lately. Long drives, business trips, back-to-back flights. Lenny’s Podcast became my constant companion. Episode after episode on how product work, engineering, and design are changing in the age of AI.
Somewhere along the way, something clicked.
Boris Cherny shipping 30 pull requests a day without touching a single line of code by hand. Marc Andreessen describing a Mexican standoff between PMs, designers, and engineers, each convinced they can now do the other’s job. Jenny Wen explaining how the design process she was taught is basically dead.
And it’s not just podcasts. In the product management community, Claude Code has become the topic. Coaches are building courses around it. Workshops are popping up everywhere. Everyone is trying to figure out what this means for the role and whether the role itself is shifting under our feet.
I kept thinking about a post I wrote in 2021. About the Product Trio, and I thought: that deserves an update.
It was never about three people.
In November 2021 I argued that the Product Trio is not about headcount. It’s about three dimensions every product team needs: business (PM), experience (design), and technology (engineering). Teresa Torres and Marty Cagan had been making exactly this point for years.
That foundation still holds. But something structurally new is happening.
AI is dissolving the walls between the dimensions. Not as a metaphor. Literally.
Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, ships 20 to 30 pull requests a day with five parallel agents running. He hasn’t edited a single line of code by hand since November. His take: “I have never enjoyed coding as much as I do today because I don’t have to deal with all the minutia.” At Anthropic, productivity per engineer has increased 200%.
It’s not just speed. On the Claude Code team, everyone carries the same title: Member of Technical Staff. No role boundaries by design. PRDs are gone, replaced by hundreds of working prototypes. Cherny’s prediction: “The title software engineer is going to start to go away. It’s just going to be replaced by builder.”
Marc Andreessen puts it bluntly:
“Every coder now believes they can also be a product manager and a designer because they have AI. Every product manager thinks they can be a coder and a designer. And every designer knows they can be a product manager and a coder. They’re actually all kind of correct.”
His career advice, borrowed from Larry Summers: don’t be fungible. The additive effect of being genuinely good at two things is more than double. Three things: more than triple. You become a specialist in the combination.
Design is shifting too.
Jenny Wen, Head of Design for Claude Co-work and former Director of Design at Figma, describes it from the inside. A few years ago, 60 to 70% of her work was mocking and prototyping. Today it’s 30 to 40%. The rest is pairing directly with engineers and implementing in code herself.
The old design process: research, diverge, converge, beautiful deck is in her words “basically dead.” Vision cycles that used to stretch two to five years now run three to six months, often ending not in a polished presentation but in a working prototype.
What replaced the old process is a different kind of discipline: “In a world where people can spin off their seven Claudes and make whatever features they want, you need to point them towards something.”
Designers are increasingly doing that pointing from inside the code, not from behind a Figma file. As Wen puts it: “It’s not just designers who feel they have to keep up with engineers. Even engineers are like: how do we keep up with ourselves?”
But here’s the caveat.
Shreyas Doshi makes an important point. AI tools commoditize fast. Being AI-native is a short-term advantage. In a world where everyone has access to roughly equivalent AI capabilities, tools will never be a significant source of alpha.
The real long-term moat is what he calls Product Sense: empathy, simulation, strategic thinking, taste, and creative execution. The ability to improve on what AI gives you. To make the call that matters.
Jenny Wen agrees, with her own caveat: “AI’s sense of taste will get better. We might be holding on to that a little bit too much.” But at the end of the day, someone has to decide what gets built and what actually matters. “Someone still needs to be accountable for the decision.”
This is not a contradiction. It’s the necessary next layer.
The trio is blurring, yes. But the result is not a tool-virtuoso who vibe-codes their way to a great product. It’s someone who holds all three dimensions and has the judgment to know what to build, for whom, and why. The builder who wins is not the one who uses the most tools. It’s the one who knows what to build.
Discovery matters more, not less.
Teresa Torres is right that the risk of becoming a feature factory grows when shipping gets cheaper and faster. Discovery discipline matters more than ever, precisely because the cost of building the wrong thing at high speed has never been higher.
In 2021 I argued the trio was about dimensions, not people. That still holds. What’s new is that one person, properly tooled, can increasingly hold all three. But tooling alone is table stakes.
The PM who thrives closes the loop between customer insight and running code. Fast, fluidly, with both hands and the judgment to know which loop to close.
Don’t be fungible.
What do you observe? Are the boundaries between PM, design, and engineering blurring on your team too? Do you have enough time and space to experiment, learn, and actually create value from all of this?
Worth listening to yourself:
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