Ian Silber: evaluation

Transcript context

…So along those lines, when Marc Andreessen was on the podcast, he had this hilarious way of describing the state of the product org right now. He's like, basically there's this three-way standoff. PMs, engineers, designers, they all think the other roles are going to go away and they're the ones that are going to win in the end. And so there's those Spider-Man meme where they're all pointing at each other. And I'm curious, because I can see a case for each role becoming the dominant role. And I completely agree with you that with all of the tools being shipped, there's a thousand X explosion in products being shipped. There's just endless streams of things to pay attention to. You'd think design would be such an opportunity to differentiate and stand out. I haven't seen that yet in just an acceleration of design hires and explosion, as you said, two designers to one engineer. Do you think that's coming? Why do you think that hasn't happened yet? Do you think it's, as you said, just early and people will realize, "Oh wow, we need a lot more designers."? What do you think's going on? We might start to see that happen more. Or if anything, we might start to see engineers wanting to become a little bit more design focused. I also think that designers are getting more productive. It's not necessarily the same direct output of engineers 10Xing, but we are seeing that designers are able to do a lot more. But no, I mean, I think that is something we're always thinking about and evolving. The other thing I wanted to talk about too is the difference between PM and edge and design, and are they all blurring together? And my point of view is that they definitely are, and there's always been overlap as far as I've seen it. I've seen designers that are really good product manager type, archetype, but can design. And I've seen designers that are really good polish engineer type. So I've always found that these single siloed role definitions don't really make sense. It's just that at big companies you have to have a ladder to put people on so you can generally organize. But in the reality, when you look at a team, you see that there are people that have various strengths and people that play different roles. And so I've always seen that. I think those lines have always been blurry, but they're becoming blurrier for sure. But the other thing is I do still think that, and maybe this is thinking about it from a slightly larger company perspective, but I think you do still need people that have certain responsibilities. Because if you have one person that's expected to design, to rally a team around something, to align a whole company, to do all the work that a PM does, for example, and also be designing it and also be engineering it, it might be hard to find one person that's good at all of those different skills. And so I still find a lot of value, for example, in having an excellent PM that can help rally multiple teams together, that can help sharpen the perspective or the problem space that a team is focused on, that can help with resourcing, all of those things. And so I do think there will still be value in these and people focused on different parts of building a project or a product. That doesn't mean that maybe there's more fluidity that people can move between them, but having somebody who is generally responsible for these different things or an engineer who's really making sure that the output is totally sound and is actually laddering up to something that is going to work for the broader system. I completely agree. And so just to make sure I understand what you're saying is just talk about all the roles blurring. There's like, maybe we'll all just be builders and we do everything. And you're saying is like, no, that's not going to happen. I'm picturing Venn diagrams of product design engineering converging, but you're saying they're going to continue to stay their own roles. They're going to be PM, design engineer, but each can do more of the other roles.…

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