His point is that the old split between engineers, designers, product managers, and data scientists is becoming too coarse.
At Anthropic, he sees how the rise of AI is starting to blur the boundaries between roles.
In practice, a person’s value is not defined by their title, but by how they move the product forward.
Boris suggests looking at a team through five archetypes:
- Prototyper
Finds new ideas and quickly turns them into early versions.
- Builder
Takes an idea and turns it into a real product.
- Sweeper
Simplifies, removes what is unnecessary, and makes the system cleaner and faster.
- Grower
Takes a working product and improves it step by step.
- Maintainer
Owns the reliability, security, and scalability of a mature system.
It’s a useful frame because it explains reality better than job titles.
A team may have many engineers, but still lack a Builder.
It may have strong design, but lack a Sweeper.
It may have a product manager, but no Grower.
And the opposite is also true: someone may formally belong to one function, while actually covering a completely different role for the product.
