A Job With No Name
I have a job that doesn't have a name yet. Maybe you do too.
Mine lives inside insur-tech, a phrase that has never once made a stranger lean in at a party. But stay a minute anyway, because the future rarely announces itself where the cameras are pointed. It shows up first in the boring rooms, the unglamorous industries, the places nobody's performing for anyone. That's where it's easiest to catch, honestly.
I've been chewing on this for a few weeks now, and a lot of that chewing started after reading Laurie Voss's essay "We are all Product Engineers now," which argues that as the cost of writing code collapses, the job that survives is the one nobody can automate: figuring out what a specific customer actually needs, in enough detail that someone (or something) can build it. I'm not writing this to summarize his argument. I'm writing it because I read it while living a smaller, messier version of the same question inside my own team, and I wanted to work out what I actually believe before I said it out loud to my boss.
My team just doubled down on AI talent: engineers, architects, LLM specialists, the works. The instinct, reasonable enough, is to ask: whose job is safe? Here's my honest answer. Everyone we've hired is safe. Everyone we hire in the near term will be safe too. What I can't tell you, and what I don't think anyone honestly can, is how long "near term" lasts. Demand right now is bottomless enough that we could automate half our stack tomorrow and still not have enough hands, because the ceiling isn't efficiency, it's how many customers we can serve, how many products we can build, how many fires we can put out before the next one starts. Scarcity of capacity beats efficiency of process, for now.
For now is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and I'll admit I don't know its expiration date. My honest guess, and it is a guess, is that real skill buys more runway than people expect. Not credentials, not tenure, but the kind of professionalism and depth that shows up as judgment under pressure. I lean optimistic on that front. But I'd be lying if I said I was certain. Time will tell, and I'd rather say that plainly than pretend I have a timeline I don't.
I've been turning an idea over with my boss lately, half pitch, half thinking out loud, about whether our Product Managers could grow into something closer to Product Engineers. He's not wrong to have reservations. Not every PM wants to write code, and not every PM should have to; that's a real constraint, not an excuse to wave away. So let me be precise about what I actually mean, because the two roles get blurred together and the blur is where the resistance lives.
A Product Manager, in the shape most people know, decides what should get built and why, then hands that decision to someone else to build. The job is judgment, prioritization, and translation, and it can be excellent work done entirely without touching code. A Product Engineer does the same judgment work but doesn't stop at the handoff. They carry the idea far enough to produce something real: a working prototype, a rough v1, a thing a customer can click on instead of a thing they have to imagine. The difference isn't seniority and it isn't a technical bar you clear once. It's where the job stops. One stops at a well written ticket. The other stops at a working draft.
I keep coming back to the gap between "build this, and here's why" and "here's a v1, tell me what's wrong with it." The first is a suggestion. The second is a gift. Even a rough prototype instead of a wish list saves everyone weeks of meetings pretending to agree on what "this" meant. I don't think it's a light switch; technical and non-technical PMs both have a place, but I do think the center of gravity is moving, and I'd rather be early to that conversation than late to it. Writing this is partly how I'm working out where I actually stand before I bring it back to him.
The junior end of every technical lane is the one standing in the surf when the tide comes in. The people with opinions, forged by years of being wrong in useful ways, are the ones who stay dry.
I'm not trying to be a Product Owner. I'm barely willing to be called a Product Manager. What I'm actually doing is "apprenticing" for Product Engineer: build the taste, learn the rudiments, get the muscle memory and be where the puck is headed ...
Which brings me to the strange part: the role I'm describing already exists. It just doesn't have one name yet; it has five, and the market hasn't sorted out which one sticks.
Job postings for "Forward Deployed Engineer" grew roughly 729% year-over-year in the past twelve months, with total comp stretching past $785K for senior roles at the top labs. The same core function is also being posted as "Business Translator," "AI Enablement Lead," and half a dozen other titles, at wildly different pay. That's not confusion, that's a market moving faster than its own paperwork. Nobody's uncertain that this work matters; they're just early enough that HR hasn't caught up with a name for it yet. That gap is the opportunity: walk in and start doing the job before someone writes the job description.
Which leaves the only question worth asking, the one no job posting was ever written to answer: how do you go about earning taste, instead of catching it like a cold?
I don't think there's a shortcut. You pay close attention to the people you're building for. You show up with an opinion instead of just a question, and you let it get corrected in front of people smarter than you until it starts being right. You write down every term you don't understand and make it yours. And here's the part I'd have scoffed at five years ago: I don't think that's stealing anymore, not really, or if it is, everyone's doing it, including the machines. The models learned by reading everyone who came before them, and now we're all learning by reading the models. IP, in the old sense, might be quietly becoming a relic. What's left standing when the copying is free and instant isn't who owns the idea, it's who has the taste to know which ideas are worth having, the nerve to act on them first, and the human judgment nobody can fully automate out of the loop. That's the blue ocean now. Getting there first, with taste intact, matters more than it ever did.
Nobody's going to hand you the title. You're going to have to become annoyingly good at the job until somebody invents a name for what you already are. If you want the longer, sharper version of why that title is coming, Laurie Voss wrote it, and it's worth your twenty minutes: "We are all Product Engineers now."