The End of Companies As We Know It: AI and the "Organizational Meta"

Uh I I I think I have some controversial views and it's pretty long- winded so I don't know if I want to dive deeply into that. Okay.
All right. So So I am an AI maximalist. So uh so I I think one one thing to think about is that um I don't think that the the the current way that we think about product management is going to exist however much time from now. Maybe maybe 12 months from now. maybe a couple of years from now, but I think it's going to change. And it it'll change because when you think about what AI fundamentally is doing is it's going to subsume a lot of work from uh different roles. And so just just to kind of make this a little bit more practical, you know, I would talk to a PM at my company and that PM would be like, "Haha, look at the artists. All their work is going to get taken away by AI." And then you know the then I I think Daario the the CEO of Anthropic would post something and they're like haha look at the engineers all their

work is going to be taken over by AI. And then I talked to the engineers like ha haha guess what all the product managers work is going to be taken over by AI. And if you think about it, there are going to be a set of capabilities and tasks that are subsumed by AI both on the low end and the high end. Meaning like boring, repetitive work obviously will be taken over by AI. And there are going to be some types of tasks and work that are just too complex for human beings to figure out that are going to be taken over by AI. And so when you think about traditional roles, whether you're a product manager, engineer, or artist, there's going to be a lot of tasks and capabilities that are taken over by AI. So what does that leave for humans? Well, if you go to the extreme in terms of AI and believe in super intelligence, and I absolutely hope we never get there, then then in that world, you know, human beings just no longer have a need to exist and and super intelligence will do anything everything. But if we go to a c in that

transition and as AI gets better and better, what I think will actually happen is that roles will compress, teams will compress. And so what does that mean? That means that the work that a typical um product manager will do, I think, is not going to make sense. And there's going to be something a concept that I call organizational meta. Meaning if you think about like some people talk about AI in the context of like you have currently a fixed organizational structure that doesn't change and at the other extreme end you have a completely dynamic structure for for a team and a company that completely changes. I don't believe in either view. I think that just like in League of Legends when they change the meta and champions abilities, there's going to be limitations, capabilities, weights, meaning strengths and weaknesses and various things that create an organizational meta. And so

what I think is going to happen is that in this organizational meta for a specific kind of product that what will happen is that there is going to be a maximally effective type of organization that makes the most sense. And so you may not have an engineer anymore or a product manager anymore. You might have a product engineer or a product marketer or some of these roles are going to combine and there's going to be a new kind of organizational structure that is maximally effective in these organizations that can't change because you're in a big company like I I don't want to name the companies. Some of these compan are still mad at me for things I've said in the past but yeah they're like still angry. It's like, dude, I said that two years ago. Anyway, but like so if you're part of these large big companies where you've got fixed roles and you're highly vertically oriented, you're going to be in a lot of trouble. Your organization I don't think

is going to be competitive in the future. So from the perspective of a product manager, I think that the product manager role to some degree is going to in some situations completely not be necessary like especially if you do like web type of products and things like that. And also but in gaming maximally important because why? Because there needs to be somebody who orchestrates the organization. There needs to be somebody who looks at intelligence and you talked about different kinds of returns but there's also something that Dario this the CEO of anthropic calls a return to intelligence and so when you think about this person who or helps orchestrate the kind of organization that's necessary to be maximally competitive and also is looking at where do we get the best returns to intelligence and implies that to different parts of the company. Those are the kinds of organizations that are

just going to whoop ass on every other big organization that just fundamentally cannot change.
I'll I'll just stop there. Sorry.