Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

Why product roles need to stay

3 Jul 2026 · 1 min

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Lenny Rachitsky argues that eliminating dedicated product roles in favor of generic builders erodes a mature discipline with proven best practices. Every function has specialized skills that cannot be fully mastered by everyone, and losing product roles means losing institutional knowledge and rigor.

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I've heard a lot of companies be like, we're getting rid of the product role and everybody's just going to be a builder, which I think is a terrible idea. The danger in eliminating the concept of roles is that it can dangerously eliminate the idea that things are specialties with knowable best practices. This whole discipline of product that's been built up and has real best practices, real things that have been tried and failed, real processes that just gets abandoned because people are like, oh, I wrote some code. That's not a great place to be in. Not everybody can work on everything. Every discipline has a skill component to it, which I think a lot of engineers are guilty of not recognizing. They're like, well, engineering has a skill to it. It's writing code. And like other roles are just people vibing. Like, yes, you can use Excel, but you cannot work on the finance team.