 | TL;DR: Anthropic's own Head of Product just told her team half their job title stopped being true.
The half that's gone is coordination — the getting-everyone-aligned, same-page work that used to justify the PM/TPM title in the first place. Angela Jiang, Head of Product at Anthropic, says on camera that alignment now happens inside one conversation with the model, faster than a meeting could get scheduled to talk about it. Katelyn Lesse, Head of Engineering, describes the same shift from the execution side: a project that used to take weeks of coordination now gets built in two days, and there's no time left over to do the coordinating.
Neither of them is describing a layoff. That's the detail worth sitting with — the roster didn't shrink, the day-to-day content of the role did, and nobody had to announce anything for that to become true.
What's left, per Jiang, is the part underneath the coordination layer — the actual bet, the actual thesis, the judgment call about what's worth solving. That part doesn't compress. It's also the part most coordination-heavy roles were never built to develop, because coordination was the easier thing to measure and reward.
I specifically remember 2 instances. The first one was during my time with one of the largest property developers in Malaysia. One of my many tasks is to put together preliminary development proposals, compiling architectural drawings, 3D renderings and feasibility studies with land and building data, cost, revenue, etc. into a A3 size binder. Each of these drawings have multiple blocks for signature at the bottom – meant for all the directors (technical, contracts, marketing, etc. etc.) to sign off on, before our big boss, Tan Sri DT make his final signature on it. That was back in year 2018. And it was inefficient – to say the least. Getting all of them to sign of the proposal one by one, would normally takes weeks. Even Month. Yeah. They're still doing it the old fashion way – reviewing physical paper. But it is what it is. The second one was during my time working for one of the largest construction companies in Malaysia, seconded to Abu Dhabi for a 5-Block Condominium Project – back in year 2010. Our IT guy built/assembled an approval pipeline app for approving sub-contracts. All done online – linking and streamlining all our department heads' electronic signature. My then department head was Mr. Yap, our technical director. I remember one day, our big boss, Senior Project Director, Mr. Chung came over to remind Mr. Yap, "Eh, you haven't sign off the XYZ. Only left you alone." Both of them were already in their 50s – pushing 60. And if my memory serves me correctly, Mr. Yap replied back with a slight dismissive hand-gesture, "Wait-lah! I'll do it." Back then. The main bottlenecks are the people signing off. Now with AI getting more ubiquitous, we no longer have the luxury of "Wait-lah! I'll do it." later. Time is money. _____________________________________ I've stopped being surprised by which job titles survive a transcript intact while the actual job underneath gets hollowed out — this is maybe the fourth or fifth time I've watched it happen in someone else's transcript before it happens in mine. The tools change, the org chart changes, the shape of the loss doesn't: value stops being paid out for effort and starts being paid out for whatever can't be automated yet.
Hmm — this actually reminded me of something I flagged a while back. Rauch's own version of this: the engineering role splitting into an execution layer and a judgment layer, and the judgment layer being the one worth owning.
Curious whether anyone here's already watched their own coordination layer get eaten by an agent, or if this is still theoretical where you sit.
Clip credit: Kleiner Perkins — full video (Builders, Season 2: Katelyn Lesse & Angela Jiang, Anthropic) on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.
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Predictive technology: computational social science
