Make money doing the work you believe in
Boris Cherny just mapped the 5 roles forming on the Claude Code team.
None of them is a job title.
At Anthropic the PM codes, the designer codes, even finance codes. Everyone carries the same title: Member of Technical Staff.
They pull all this off with a unique structure:
◆ They don't write PRDs
They build first. When they shipped agent teams, they tried hundreds of versions before one made it out.
◆ They expect most prototypes to die
The little spinner you see while Claude Code is working took 50 to 100 iterations to get right, and about 80% of those never shipped.
◆ They ship faster than sounds possible
Cowork, a full product for non-engineers, came together in about ten days.
◆ Claude Code reviews every pull request before a human does
The model catches most of the bugs on the first pass, then an engineer does the final one.
◆ They bet on the general model
There is a framed copy of the bitter lesson on the wall where the team sits. The general model beats the specialized one, every time.
This results in five archetypes, which Boris identified:
Prototyper, who spins up dozens of ideas knowing most will die
Builder, who turns a survivor into production code
Sweeper, who simplifies the system and unships what isn't pulling weight
Grower, who takes a shipped product and pushes it toward fit
Maintainer, who keeps a mature system fast and reliable as it scales
These aren't fixed roles. One person moves between them depending on what the product needs that week.
So the way forward for PMs is clear. When your engineers can each run several agents at once, speed stops being the constraint. The constraint becomes whether anyone in the room can separate the prototype that turns into a product from the one that burns a quarter. If that person is you, you are about to get a lot more valuable.
Here's the full breakdown of that skill: news.aakashg.com/p/tast…
To go deeper, here's what you need:
The AI-native operating model, role by role: news.aakashg.com/p/ai-p…
The Claude Code setup I use to work this way: news.aakashg.com/p/pm-os
How non-technical PMs can work this way: youtube.com/watch?v=bYi…
Why evals are becoming the new PRD, with Braintrust CEO Ankur Goyal: open.spotify.com/episod…
You don't need a new title or anyone's permission to start. Build five versions of something this week and keep the one that earns its place. That call might be the most valuable rep a PM can take right now.
