AI is significantly impacting product development job roles, but will do so differently at different organizations.
Ok, so… you’re a product designer… you heard that AI is coming for all our jobs. But is it coming for your job, your co-worker’s job, and your other co-worker’s job the same way?
AI tech will impact many roles previously safe from automation or offshoring.
To understand this moment, take a look at what experts are saying about AI’s impact on a lot of different jobs. Here’s an article from Forbes published in April of this year. The title? These Jobs Will Fall First As AI Takes Over The Workplace
The article goes on to describe ways that jobs that will be impacted or eliminated by AI tech.
The first wave is jobs that perform repeated tasks: data entry, scheduling, and first tier customer service; tools are replacing these roles
The next wave is jobs that are repetitive but have some technical consideration. Bookkeeping, financial modeling, and basic data analysis; Banks are building out these capabilities.
And the list goes on.
AI will impact tasks that are applied across many roles.
Another way to look at it is to break down jobs into different tasks.
The team at Visual Capitalist created a chart of skills like writing, active learning, critical thinking, etc. And each skill has two numbers: how long it takes with AI and how long it takes without AI.
The visualization sorts the tasks by fastest to slowest after the application of Generative AI.
I wanted to see which had the biggest impact, which has the biggest change from without Gen AI to with Gen AI. At first glance, this is where the biggest impact would be on whether a given job is phased out over time: does the necessary skill get recalibrated in a significant way? And if so, how much?
There’s no screaming obvious answer in this data. But the top skills? I’m getting a big Software Engineering vibe, with Programming being 2.9x faster with generative AI tools. But the lines are blurry: on the lower end, “Judgement and Decision Making” is now 1.8x faster(?) and would obviously cover a range of roles.
Broadly speaking, these tasks have broad and deep alignment with all three product development roles: design, product management, and engineering.
But what does that mean for the people involved?
Seeing how AI delivers impact on specific tasks, it’s important to see what happens when we link all those tasks together.
AI’s impact will be acute in cross-functional environments where there is high dependence on process.
For Product orgs, the way forward with AI looks different depending where you start as a team… but do all roads lead… to MURDER??
If you are a Designer in an organization where PM and Engineering want to move fast and break things, then they can now leverage AI-driven processes and tooling to get pretty far synthesizing user research, drafting prototypes, refining UI, and spec’ing out code without you. The Designer role just got killed! Oh nooooooo!
If you are a Designer where PM is lagging, but collaboration with Engineering is strong, then you can take your user research, frame it into JTBD, even model the potential business impact, then create your own designs with an AI-accelerated workflow, break it down into Jira tickets, and work directly with Engineering on prioritization. The Product Manager role just got killed! Aaaaaaa!
If you are a Designer where PM is strong, but Engineering is lagging, then you and the PM can get pretty far honing in on customer research, accelerating your synthesis, rapidly developing prototyping options with Figma Make and Lovable, then, once you get things working, reach out to an Engineering team to help with scaling and hardening… the Software Engineering role just got killed! Hey, somebody call the cops!
We know that in each of these scenarios there are huge gaps, but the reality is, this is playing out as we speak. It’s not just reshaping or eliminating careers, but having a grueling effect on people involved. For that, we can take a more qualitative look. Stories are starting to surface of how this takes shape.
The impact of AI on process-driven roles will also be highly emotional.
A UX designer with 7 years experience is having a significant and negative emotional experience to the design work that their PM completed with AI tools.
I replied to them on Reddit, but in summary, this is going to be a journey fraught with emotional challenges and those emotions can get in the way of our concentration, our ability to be flexible, and our ability to perform at our best overall. I advise that UX designer to break the problem down, including identifying and separating out the emotions that are felt. Then addressing the problem through collaboration with the PM.
AI is impacting hard skills which can be quantified, but still lacks on impacting soft skills.
High-performing, high-quality teams are bound together by respect, collaboration, ingenuity, and the psychological safety needed for growth. These ‘soft skills’ let a team level up their output together. That’s when 1+1=3.
Leadership must seize the opportunity to move the whole team forward
This path ahead is paved by a few factors:
– the competency or maturity of the functional role before AI
– the relationships built around the others on the team
– the soft skills and abilities of those in each role to adapt, collaborate, assess, and learn
So if all roles are strong… and all roles take on accelerated workflows and tooling… and if the people on the team are supported through this insane time of transition… then you’re not killing off roles, your leveling up capacity. This is the REAL goal. This is the future we WANT.
Who knows, with all this newfound capacity, some of these products we build might actually be good!
So what do I do?
Well, we’re off to a great start.
Here are three suggestions to move forward
For individuals: experiment and get good. Yes, it’s worth signing up for your own subscription for GPT pro or Claude pro or Lovable or Figma pro. Experiment with having GPT open in one screen and just ask it questions along the way. New to vibe coding? Tell it what you want to do and how you should start. New to GPT? Ask it how to make the best prompts. It’s sort of smart and dumb at the same time. Experimenting is the best way to level up.
Most importantly, once you get your bearints, see how tools can fit together. See what happens when you create something in Figma Make, then spin it up in Lovable. See what happens when you build an automation in Zapier that runs a prompt in ChatGPT. There’s a lot of potential and, at least at the moment, the bar is pretty low in most organizations.
For teams: learn together. If you’re learning on your own, Regularly share what you learn. Break off a project and mess around. See if it’s something you can do quickly and clean up if you screw up.
For leaders: set the standard. This is where the real power is to scale within an organization. Join your team in experimenting and learning. Have the team identify what projects might be good for trying new methods, and if it fits, back them up. You can help set the metrics for the success of these experiments, the KPIs you’re trying to hit. Help frame the team’s ideas for what it means to get higher quality results.
Talk with other leaders about setting a culture that will elevate the disciplines you will invest in. Know what kind of org you are and will be. —find those ways to emphasize soft skills, set an expectation that you gotta be good at that
Most importantly, like any individual, you gotta learn. You need to lead by example.
Those are some tips! I’d love to hear what you’re up to, what’s working, and what isn’t.