I was talking to a CPO recently whose team is writing code with Claude Code and shipping to production, similar to what LinkedIn is doing with their builders program. It's efficient, the velocity is high, and it's also creating a really interesting dynamic at the exec table. Product is encroaching on engineering and vice versa, and everyone is sticking their elbows out a little to protect their turf because they're nervous the CEO will collapse the org and cut headcount.
A lot of people are dealing with some version of this right now. Underneath the obvious tension that AI is creating, there's something deeper going on that's worth naming. It's an identity crisis. I'm seeing two flavors of it.
We stitch our professional identities into the function we sit in. "I am a product person." "I am an engineer." "I am a designer." But those functional pillars are org structures defined 30 years ago, and they are not the structure of the future. Anchoring your identity to a functional org is unhealthy right now, especially when that org is getting redefined or possibly even blown up.
A few recommendations if you or your team are dealing with this.
Let go of the pillars. They're from a different era. They're not laws of physics. The org chart you grew up in is not the org chart of tomorrow, and we have to accept that.
Switch from nouns to verbs. "Product person" is a noun. It's the team. But if you build your identity around an action, like "I build and ship products customers love," that travels with you. Verbs survive reorgs. Nouns don't.
Be end-to-end. When I was at Goldman Sachs from 2006 to 2008, my title was business analyst, which was similar to product management before product management was such a thing. But the job was really to translate between business users and engineers. If you're a go-between right now, you're not needed. Anything where "glue" or "liaise" is a core part of your activities, throw it out. If you're building products, then talk to customers, articulate what a winning product looks like, build it, and ship it. If you sell, then set the pricing, make your pitches, and close deals. If you market, then design the brand and the campaigns and run them top to bottom. Whatever you do, do it completely.
Orchestrate agents. To get the best leverage, you need expertise in managing agents and expertise in your craft. People who can iterate with agents but don't have real expertise produce crap because they can't tell a good output from a bad one. People with deep expertise who don't know how to work with agents are too slow right now. You need both. Agents amplify what you are already capable of.
I was talking to a CTO recently who is running a big team inside a top AI company. Something was bothering him and he couldn't put his finger on exactly what. We figured out that he had always identified as a builder, the best coder in the room. Then he became a leader and got his leverage through other people. Now, in this new environment, the expectation is that he's leading a team AND building AND managing agents AND being in the details AND being able to zoom out to 60,000 feet to talk strategy AND then drop back down to tweak pixels on a screen.
That context switching is hard. But the harder part is the identity piece. "I was a builder, I became a leader, now I need to be a builder again, while still leading." Leaders are not sure how to allocate their time. It's confusing.
A few thoughts here.
Call it out. This is not the first time we've dealt with identity crises. I worked with a company called TCARE out of St. Louis that supports people caring for elderly family members. When you become a caregiver, it's a stressful psychological moment, because without realizing it, your identity is shifting. Are you a son or daughter? A caretaker? A parent to your own kids at home? An ambitious professional? All of them at once? A big part of what TCARE does is help people see that they're in an identity transition. When people can name it and manage through it, the people they care for actually live years longer, because everyone keeps their sanity. Just naming the thing is huge. Same applies here. Builder versus leader, functional pillar collapse, whatever the flavor, it helps to say out loud that this is real, it's stressful, and there's a path through it.
Get closer to the metal. As an executive you now have tools that can 100x your output. Say you used to sew shirts and now you have an assembly line that can output 100 in the time it used to take you to make one. That's great, but only if you know how to identify when the stitching is off and stop the assembly line. You have to keep every nut and bolt tight or you'll get 100 crappy shirts you can't sell. With AI you can have a hundred great shirts, but only if you're close enough to the work to actually run the machine. That means being in the details in a way a lot of executives haven't had to be in years.
Intentionally allocate your time and energy. This isn't binary. It's not "I am a maker" or "I am a manager." It's a pie chart of your time and the pie chart probably needs shifting. The CTO I mentioned ended up giving about 10 to 20 percent of his time back to writing code, and he was completely reinvigorated by it. You got into what you do because you love designing experiences, or talking to customers and winning deals, or shipping products that radically improve the lives of users. The function was just the wrapper. Frame this as an opportunity to get back to the work you fell in love with in the first place.
Changing the story we tell ourselves about ourselves is a big deal. But there's a path through it and you don't have to do it alone.
If this hits home, feel free to reach out.
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