Who is replacing who?

I have never been more capable as a product person than I am right now. I can prototype a flow before lunch, pull and analyze data without waiting on anyone, write the copy, mock the design and test the idea with real users by the end of the week. And I have never felt more exposed. The same tools that make me more capable make everyone around me more capable too, and some of them are starting to look at my job the way I've started looking at theirs.

More capable than ever

The upside is real and it's worth saying plainly. A lot of what used to slow product work down was waiting. Waiting for a designer to have time for a mockup. Waiting for an analyst to answer a question that took ten minutes once someone finally ran the query. Waiting for engineering to build a throwaway prototype just to learn that the idea didn't work. Most of that waiting is gone. What used to take a sprint of hand-offs, one person with good judgment can now finish in two days.

That should feel like pure good news. It doesn't, because of what comes attached to it.

Squeezed from both sides

The first pressure comes from above. If you can prototype, design, analyze and write, why does the team still need a designer, an analyst and a copywriter? More and more, product people are expected to absorb the roles around them. Not because anyone decided that was a good structure, but because it looks efficient on a spreadsheet. The one-person product team is being sold as a superpower. Often it's just a headcount decision wearing a nicer outfit.

The second pressure comes from the side, and it's the one people talk about less. If AI builds the product, then building stops being the scarce part. Distribution becomes the scarce part. And the person who owns distribution is usually not in product. A marketer with an audience, a channel and a feel for what gets attention can now describe a product to a model, ship a working version and push it to thousands of people before a product team finishes its discovery. From that angle, the product person isn't the one doing the replacing. They're the one being replaced.

Crypto taught me this early. The first product, or even the better one, wasn't always the one that ended up on top. Often it was whoever reached the most users fastest, because scale compounds. Being first or being best doesn't guarantee the win when someone else owns the reach.

Everyone thinks they're replacing everyone

Here is what I find most telling. Engineers look at AI and conclude they don't need product. Product looks at AI and concludes it doesn't need design. Designers conclude they don't need front-end developers. Marketers conclude they don't need any of us. Every role, at the same moment, believes it can absorb every other role.

They can't all be right. What actually happened is simpler. The cost of a first draft collapsed, for everyone, in every discipline at once. Anyone can now produce a passable version of anyone else's output. That's a real change. But a passable first draft was never what made those roles valuable. The value was in knowing which draft to keep, what it was missing, and what it would cost six months later.

A scare, and a restructuring

So is this a momentary scare? Partly. The panic that every role is about to vanish is a scare, and it will pass the way these things pass, when the first wave of teams that cut too deep discovers what they cut. Products built without anyone owning the whole picture will ship fast and age badly.

But underneath the scare, something permanent is happening, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of denial. Teams will be smaller. Roles that were mostly hand-off, writing the spec and passing it along, grooming the backlog, translating between people who can now talk directly, are going away. The product people who were mainly coordinators should be worried. The ones who own outcomes, who decide what gets built and answer for whether it worked, are going to have more leverage than they've ever had.

And the marketer with the audience? They're not a threat to that person. They're the best partner that person could ask for. Distribution without judgment ships the wrong thing faster. Judgment without distribution builds the right thing that nobody hears about. The teams that win will have both, and they won't spend their energy arguing about who replaced who.

Bottom lines

More capable and more exposed are the same fact. The tools that make you faster make everyone around you faster too.

Absorbing every role is a headcount decision, not a superpower. Be honest about which one your team is actually making.

When building gets cheap, distribution gets valuable. Product people who ignore that will be outpaced by people who own the audience.

The scare is temporary. The restructuring isn't. Coordination roles are shrinking. Ownership of outcomes is not.

The question going around every team right now is who is replacing who. I think it's the wrong question. AI didn't make any role unnecessary. It made the first draft of every role free, and in doing so, exposed which parts of each job were only ever the first draft. The product people who come out of this well won't be the ones who absorbed everyone else's work. They'll be the ones whose work was never the draft to begin with.