Lenny Distilled

AI will flatten organizations and blur roles

Leadership → Org Design

We're entering the era where we collapse the stack in every organization where instead of having to go to someone for anything, you can kind of do more things yourself.

Scott BelskyLessons on product sense, AI, the first mile experience, and the messy middle

We need to dissolve the boundaries of these traditional roles and call ourselves builders. I'd love for us to get to the world where that's the title.

Julie ZhuoFrom managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now

I really believe in the concept of the full stack builder. You're seeing it with a bunch of the AI native companies that are coming up. I'm even seeing it in enterprises that have been around for 50 years starting to operate in that way. And I think that gives you velocity and throughput.

Asha SharmaHow 80,000 companies build with AI: Products as organisms and the death of org charts

We're approaching this world in which the marginal cost of the good output is approaching zero. We're going to see exponential demand for productivity and outputs. The way that you scale to that is with agents. When all of that happens, the org chart starts to become the work chart. You just don't need as many layers.

Asha SharmaHow 80,000 companies build with AI: Products as organisms and the death of org charts
Supporting

Don't bolt it on. Don't be like, 'Oh, we'll have a bunch of AI people...' I think it's much better to have everyone learn about it.

Paul AdamsWhat AI means for your product strategy
Supporting

One of the ways that we've kind of thought about Devin in building Devin is really allowing engineers to go from bricklayer to architect, so to speak. A lot of it is just getting to the point where you can do the high-level directing and you can basically specify things exactly how you want. I think it's very much about still having the human in control and having the human able to do the full specification, but just multiplying the magnitude of what you can do and what you can build in one day or one hour or however long.

Scott WuInside Devin: The AI engineer that's set to write 50% of its company's code this year
Supporting

The goal itself is to empower great builders to take their idea and to take it to market, regardless of their role and the stack and specifically which team they're on.

Tomer CohenWhy AI is disrupting traditional product management
Supporting

I could imagine whatever five years from now, someone running a billion-dollar company with zero employees where it's like the support is handled by AI, the development is handled by AI.

Amjad MasadBehind the product: Replit
Nuanced

Management skills are not broadly distributed, because it's very expensive... It's now going to be much cheaper to manage, so more people are going to have to do it.

Dan ShipperThe AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code