Thesis

Once producing stops being scarce, a product role is defined by what it can judge, build or guarantee

Info

Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.

Angle

In a team where a developer interviews customers and a Product Manager pushes a pull request, the job title stops predicting anything: what situates a person is the rung they reach between the mockup and the production deliverable, and the kind of decision they answer for. The blurring of roles does not dissolve responsibilities, it makes them more costly to leave implicit — a product choice, a technical choice and an experience choice each keep their guarantor, and it is precisely because those three lines are held that everyone can step in beyond their home territory. What governs that opening is neither the discipline nor the title, but the risk of the area touched: a translation, a read-only screen and a billing rule do not call for the same standard, including in a regulated product. The one point that is redistributed to nobody and to no machine is commitment: someone has to stand in front of the others, six months later, and answer for the bet.

Synthesis

Taken one by one, these ideas look like field observations about a well-equipped team. Placed end to end, they describe how an organization can let its perimeters deform without losing track of who answers for what.

The starting point is an imbalance. Producing becomes much cheaper; deciding does not follow. If everything keeps coming back to the same place, the gain in production turns into a queue in front of the Product Manager, and the same scene replays step by step along the chain — the code speeds up, the product blocks, then the design, then the launch. It is that imbalance, and not a doctrine about roles, that pushes towards redistribution.

The redistribution happens in both directions, and both movements have their condition. Developers move up towards the product because delegating implementation to an agent forces them to write down what they used to fill in silently: edge cases, error messages, fallback behaviours. But shipping faster does not confer ownership — without access to customers, data and arbitrations, what is handed over is a burden, not a power. Product profiles move down towards building, and there too a condition appears: what counts is not the original discipline but the rung reached, and the gap between profiles turns on access to the material rather than on aptitude.

There remain the two mechanisms that keep this movement from becoming disorder. The first is structural: guarantors hold the standards of their domain, and it is their presence that authorizes the others to spill over. The second is gradual: the perimeter opens up by zones of increasing risk, the way you progressively widen a junior developer's ground, and the contribution review becomes the place where the organization says what it agrees to receive.

What the whole brings into view: the minimum level rises everywhere. The initial production of a specification, an analysis or a mockup stops differentiating anyone, and what stays scarce sorts into three families — judging what should be built, building all the way to a usable artifact, guaranteeing that a domain holds up. The responsibilities the tooling makes central — evaluating probabilistic outputs, maintaining a product memory, keeping a repository readable — belong to the third, and nothing requires turning them into posts.

Tensions / contradictions

The main tension bears on the title. This angle holds that what matters is responsibility and not the job title; a position already written elsewhere argues the reverse, namely that the title distributes the mandate ahead of any negotiation and therefore decides what its holder will be able to settle. The two meet on one point — a title without a mandate produces nothing — and diverge on the order: should you name the responsibility first, or the title that will make it credible?

Second tension, on the split between profiles. The current advantage of technical profiles rests on the state of reliability of the tools, and it could reverse: if agents become markedly more reliable, the ability to articulate a human or business reality in detail would regain the advantage over the ability to read what is going on under the hood. Nothing allows us to date that reversal, or to say whether it will happen.

Third tension, between two requirements of this angle. Multiplying contributors on the same product increases the load on the guarantors, at the precise moment when they are expected to stop being checkpoints. The setup does not say how a guarantor absorbs that load without becoming a bottleneck again.

Questions

At what level of risk does an organization stop opening up a perimeter, and is that threshold decided product by product or area by area?
How does a team establish that a guarantor has set a standard explicit enough for contributions to conform to it without consulting him?
What becomes of the profiles that move up neither towards judgment nor towards building, in a profession whose minimum level is rising?

AI & context Product managementPM, Developers, and AI: Roles Are Blurring, Responsibilities Remain
2026-08-01 · 18 min read

Related ideas

Raising the capacity to produce moves the bottleneck onto whoever decides
the angle's starting point: it is the saturation of the decision point that makes redistribution necessary.
Accelerating a single stage of a workflow moves the bottleneck to the next one
what forbids reading the blurring of roles as a simple question of speed: the whole flow is at stake, not one step.
Delegating implementation to an agent forces the product decisions the developer absorbed in silence to be made explicit
support for the angle on the development side: what moves developers up towards the product is not speed, it is forced explicitness.
Shipping faster without access to customers or trade-offs makes an agent operator, not a product engineer
the reservation the angle carries on the development side: capacity to act is not decreed, it is given along with access.
What a contributor can carry is measured by their level of capability to act, not by the job they came from
the scale the angle rests on: it replaces the original discipline as the criterion for situating someone.
Pull request review becomes a governance mechanism as soon as non-developer profiles contribute
the mechanism through which the angle holds: the blurring is sustainable because a control exists at the entrance.
Opening up a contribution perimeter is decided on the risk of the area, not on the contributor's job
the angle's regulator: the blurring of roles is graduated by risk, not by title.
A product decision, a technical decision and an experience decision each keep their owner even when everyone contributes
the angle's hinge: it is the guarantors who make the blurring sustainable.
Working with agents makes central the product responsibilities that used to be implicit
what the angle puts in place of the titles: a list of responsibilities to be assigned.
The quality of a probabilistic output is judged on its acceptability, not only on its conformity
one of the guarantees the angle puts on a par with judging and building: making testable what is not deterministic.
An AI can analyze an option, it cannot own the bet
the limit the angle sets: everything is redistributed except commitment in front of others.
Between the specification and the release, unwritten arbitrations redefine what the customer will experience
the manufacturing fact that makes redistribution inevitable: the decisions that count are taken after the document.
A technical background gives the Product Manager a lever of access to the product's material, not a superior aptitude
what explains the unequal access to the higher rung: a lever of access to the material, not a superior aptitude.
A layer of work passes for the core of a job as long as it costs enough to fill it
the underlying mechanism: what was expensive held the definition of the role, and stops holding it when its price collapses.
A Product Manager is judged on the problems he spots before everyone else, not on the volume of artifacts he produces
where the criterion of judgment moves once producing artifacts stops differentiating.
When producing becomes abundant, the advantage moves from the capacity to produce toward understanding the context
the same shift at the scale of the company rather than of roles.
Product Engineer
names the role where building and product judgment come together in the same person.
Product Builder
names the position the angle gives as an example of a role defined by what it builds, not by its original discipline.
An interface role is judged on the separation it institutes, not on the work it does well
the same material taken from the other end: there, the trial of an instituted separation; here, what holds together an organization whose separations are deforming.