The next big job in tech may be the 'product engineer'
· Business Insider
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- As engineers ramp up their efficiency, product managers now have to manage a lot more products.
- That means companies are looking to hire more of them.
- Companies are also now making engineers product manage — a new role called the "product engineer."
Silicon Valley has long debated the value of product managers — the people tasked with aligning engineers, sales, and other teams to build products users want, often through a messy, friction-filled process.
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As AI and vibe coding turbocharge engineers, allowing them to build more and faster than ever before, however, product managers are now managing more than ever.
Companies may either need to hire more of them or invent something new altogether, Anthropic's head of growth, Amol Avasare, said on the latest episode of "Lenny's Podcast."
Avasare said engineers are easily seeing the biggest gains from AI tools like Claude Code, growing their productivity by at least two to three times.
Meanwhile, team sizes are staying the same, which means product managers and designers are now supporting what feels like much larger engineering teams — a shift that's putting pressure on their roles. "PM and design is just squeezed," Avasare said.
Avasare, a former MasterClass product manager, said that Anthropic is hiring more product managers to fill that gap. However, at larger companies, especially ones building highly technical products, he said engineers might be able to double as product managers.
Anthropic is already testing this internally.
Avasare said that if a project requires two weeks or less of engineering time, then "the engineer is on the hook to effectively be the PM for that." Those engineers would also be responsible for collaborating with the legal department and speaking with cross-functional stakeholders, he said.
"That, I think, is the approach that I expect more companies will start to do, which is just deputize the engineers to be mini PMs," he said.
Avasare isn't the first to hint at this new hybrid role.
At the HumanX AI conference last year, Zencoder CEO Andrew Filev told Business Insider that vibe coding is giving rise to the "product engineer," a hybrid of product manager and software engineer.
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