Am I a Developer? Am I a Designer? Am I a Product Manager?

Every day, I'm not exactly sure of the answer.

I studied computer science, got hired as a front end developer, and for a while the label fit. But the job kept expanding until the lines blurred and eventually disappeared.

About five years ago, I made a conscious decision: I didn't want to live inside code anymore. That wasn't the same as stopping — I kept building. But I recognized that my long-term trajectory was more about product development than engineering depth. I wanted to zoom out. So I did.

Then AI showed up and flipped everything.

Suddenly, code became commodity. The things that used to separate engineers from non-engineers started dissolving overnight. Everyone started building. And with that came a new kind of chaos — a lot of people with energy and no judgment, spinning up tools and features with no real sense of what they were doing or why.

Here's what I've been sitting with lately: for someone leading agentic product development, being serviceable across design, technical judgment, and problem-solving might actually be an advantage — not a liability.

You need the design eye. When an agent suggests a direction or generates a UI pattern, you have to be able to evaluate it. If you can't see it, you're flying blind. You need enough technical instinct to know what's actually feasible, what's a shortcut that'll cost you later, and when something sounds smart but is actually brittle underneath. And you need the product discipline to hold the thread — to not scatter your focus across seventeen half-baked ideas because the tools make everything feel equally possible.

I'm not arguing for being a generalist in the old sense — the "wears many hats" person who's mediocre at everything. That's not it. What I'm describing is something closer to fluency. You don't have to be world-class in each domain. You have to speak the language well enough to lead in it.

The weird thing about this AI moment is that it's making the case for people like me — people who never quite fit one box — in a way the industry never really did before. For years, the world rewarded specialists. Deep expertise in one lane was the ticket. And maybe it still is in certain contexts.

But if you're building agentic products? The person who can hold design, technical judgment, and product thinking simultaneously — even imperfectly — might be exactly what the work requires.

I'm still not sure what to call myself. But I'm less bothered by that than I used to be.