Job titles no longer work - that’s how Boris Cherny, Head of Claude Code sees it

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.