Scott Williamson, former GitLab CPO, on how AI helps one person do the work of many

Scott, you have had a really impactful career. You actually started your career in sales for about eight years and then transitioned into product management. What is one belief that you held for years that now with AI you think is challenged or broken?

Things are changing fast in product due to AI. One area that I think is going to change is the role definition of what product managers do and what some of these complementary roles do. So historically, best practice has been for the product manager to prioritize the problem that you're going to solve and decide what's most important to do. Then the designer steps in and helps create the right user experience to solve that chosen problem. And then engineering takes that design and builds it into something that can be delivered to customers at scale and production. That division of labor has been pretty well set for a couple of decades with AI tools like cursor, lovable, bolt, v0replit, figma, make these all enable less technical people to actually build product experiences. And so I think the lines are going to blur between what a product manager does, what a designer does, what an engineer does, and I don't know where it'll land for the next few years, but I think that one person can do more of these things with AI's assistance. And so I expect role definition and team construction to change a lot in the next couple of years.