Business killed the specialist star

Your product organization is dying under the weight of its own complexity. While you've been adding PM, PMM, UX, UXR, Growth PM, Data PM, Content Designer, Solutions Architect specialists like collecting trading cards, your competitors have already moved to something leaner, faster, and infinitely more effective.

Most of your product team is expensive organizational debt.

And wonder why you can’t find funding or the next role? It might be because you’re stuck in 2023.

The Specialist Spiral

Teams got bigger and more expensive every quarter. Handoffs killed momentum while meetings replaced shipping. Specialists lost sight of actual goals, creating beautiful artifacts in isolation with blinkers on - wireframes no one built, research reports no one read, strategies no one executed. Business can’t afford the waste anymore.

Meanwhile, AI has accelerated the death of the Director, Manager or ideas person. If your only contribution is briefing others or giving feedback, you're already irrelevant. While you're hunting for a designer or developer because you can't build, someone who can do it all has already found their first customer. 

The New Reality: The Only Two Roles That Actually Matter

The future is beautifully simple. All product work collapses into two archetypes that create value:

Sellers: Get customers. They merge PMM, growth, sales, and customer success into one role that turns interest into revenue.

Builders: Make product. They combine PM, design, engineering, and research that turn problems into solutions.

That's it. Both do ideas and strategy. Fewer handoffs = faster cycles. Everything else is overhead.

Time to Radically simplify

For Teams: Stop the madness. Merge overlapping functions immediately with shared metrics. Augment remaining roles with AI. Simplify before your competitors do—because they're already doing it.

For Individuals: Skill up and augment yourself before your rival does. Become a generalist who can span discovery to delivery or narrative to revenue. The market rewards breadth over narrow specialization now.

And right now, Sellers are more important than Builders. In a world where anyone can build, those who can actually get customers to pay attention, convert, and expand will become the new star.

Lack of business is killing the specialist star. Make sure you rewind before you go too far.