How Does the SaaS Organization Change in the Face of AI?

Do product and engineering become the same person, or the same team?

This will depend on company size and staff. Very small startups can and are rapidly changing from "the founder does discovery, the developer implements." With rapid prototyping, the founder can both "found" and build.

This works in smaller teams and smaller markets, because the surface area of customer discovery is still small. You are looking for a wedge or foothold, and are not yet concerned with market expansion.

However, as the surface area expands (along with go-to-market initiatives), specializations become more important. A product person doing customer interviews all day will perform better continuing to do customer interviews - or spending their late afternoon writing down user stories and contemplating how to synthesize solutions across many interviews.

Likewise, an engineer building will do very well continuing to build.

We must keep this in mind when making fair and efficient decisions in our hiring and in our role designations.

As always, aligning deeply with your team can give you the answers. Who is most capable of doing what role - and why? Does this lend itself to success in your current market, at your current size?

A product manager has grown the fine skills of detecting customer pain, of knowing how to elicit real issues in their market. We all understand the Mom Test, competitive intelligence, and JTBD. But it takes experience and focus to consistently deliver value in these fields. Just as well, an engineer is careful to detect when AI goes off the rails and builds a platform inconsistently (we all know its limitation in DRY code!).

This is exactly what I navigate as a fractional CTO - not just the tech decisions, but the people and role decisions that determine whether your org can actually execute.

Whether you're a service business building your first SaaS product or an existing team restructuring around AI, I help you answer: who does what, when do you specialize, and what are the trade-offs?