When I was 12 or 13, I discovered that I could create my own maps for Doom on our PC. A few years later I was building maps for StarCraft, copying new versions onto hand-labeled floppy disks and giving them to friends to playtest. Few things have given me more satisfaction than making something and watching other people enjoy it. AI-assisted development brings back that same sense of wonder.

Oh. I can actually do this.

Over the course of my professional life, my focus gradually shifted from making things myself to helping other people make them. I enjoy building and leading teams, but it doesn't quite hit the same as putting something I made into someone else's hands.

AI is making it possible for me to build that way again. And not just for me.

For years, Product Managers and Engineers approached product development from opposite ends. Product figured out what to build, Engineering figured out how to build it, and Design lived somewhere in between. The roles always overlapped, but the work still moved between people. Every handoff meant more coordination and lost context. New structures are emerging that remove a lot of that friction.

From one direction, Product Managers are becoming builders. ShipBob recently introduced a job family called AI Builders and frames it as the next step for Product Management in an AI-native world. The reasoning is simple: if AI can turn precise specifications into working code, the PM-to-Engineer handoff becomes the bottleneck. Their AI Product Builders own discovery, specs, prototypes and production PRs.

From the other direction, Engineers are moving upstream. At Langdock, Product Engineers own a customer problem rather than an implementation: talking to users, deciding what the product should do, building it across the stack, shipping it and learning from production.

Two professions are converging on the same job description, which is why nobody agrees on the name yet. Camunda has gone a step further and simply calls the role Builder, with an entire product sub-division built around it: one role combining what used to be split across Product Management, Design and Engineering, working in small AI-first pods that discover problems, define solutions, build, ship and maintain them.

I don't think Product Managers will disappear, and I don't think Engineers will either. Large, technically demanding products will keep needing deep specialists. But the range of what one person can own is widening, and for a certain kind of generalist, someone with product judgment, customer understanding, design sense and enough technical depth to build, that changes what the job can be: fewer handoffs, more ownership, end to end.

This is where product work is heading. It also happens to be the closest thing to what I was doing at 12, which makes this a good time to be someone like me.