Roles are changing
What will software teams look like in 12 months? Or 36 months? With the seismic changes that have been occurring across our industry, the way we work is adapting. Understandably, we are seeing even more varieties of team size and function.
New titles for new work
Boris Cherny, the creator and head of Claude Code at Anthropic, has suggested that his team has already moved away from traditional titles like software engineer or product designer.
- Prototyper — churns out ideas with the understanding that most won’t make it
- Builder — the executer who turns sketches and ideas into production ready reality
- Grower — the one that scales the work and brings it to the masses
- Maintainer — organizes the introduced chaos into systems, finding efficiencies
- Sweeper — polishing the product, the code, the systems for alignment
Small teams, on purpose
PostHog co-CEO James Hawkins has talked about their small team structure, setting a hard limit of no more than 6 people on any team, and averaging only 4. Each micro team is optimized for speed, not necessarily efficiency. They are responsible for their own roadmap, pricing model, docs, and performance, and are given the freedom to ship what they see as most valuable.
Though he has admitted this comes with tradeoffs: they value speed over seamlessness, acknowledge overlaps and fuzzy ownership, and say it can be difficult to find the right people for the pace and structure.
What we’re seeing at Splash
At Splash, we have started to take similar approaches, completing a set of migrations in a couple of weeks with teams of 1–2 engineers that used to take full squads a quarter. We appreciated the ability to keep the rest of the team focused on existing projects and saw success even with a small pilot. Maybe by the end of the year, we’ll be giving more micro-teams quarter long projects.
My PRDs are changing as well, with my first instinct being closer to “I’ll show you instead of tell you.” More on that soon!