A customer outcome enters the chain. The person closest to the customer uses AI to articulate it more clearly, adding context, expanding the language. The product manager receives it, uses AI to resummarize, tightening it back down before passing it along. The engineer inflates it again into something buildable, then deflates it into code. Each layer rewrites what the last one wrote. Three to 10 cycles of inflation and then deflation, and what arrives at the codebase bears no resemblance to what the customer needed.
We built those layers for a reason. The most scarce resource in a product organization was the focused attention required to write good (or even enough) code to move customer outcomes forward. Around the end of 2025, the cost of development dropped and the quality crossed a threshold. AI is one of the best coders I’ve worked with. Not the most elegant every time, but if the outcome is presented correctly, it gets there. The scarcity that justified every one of those layers is gone.
Now remove the gap between customers and the codebase. A customer outcome feeds directly into your coding tool of choice, which builds the feature and submits it for review. No inflation, no deflation, no game of telephone. Just the outcome and the code. Does it fit into your product? Was it built to standard? What’s stopping you from shipping? It’s no longer your job to gatekeep what features are built. The gate didn’t open. It flipped direction. You still control what ships.
When engineers build now, they’re building the guardrails for how customers interact with the codebase. Product managers still gatekeep, only now they’re gatekeeping on a different stage: not keeping requests out, but watching what came through and asking whether it had a positive impact, or at least not a negative one.
The people closest to customers no longer need to advocate the way they used to. The whole reason advocacy existed was to break through gates, to push an outcome past enough layers that someone with the ability to build would finally hear it. There’s nothing left to break through.
Somewhere in your company’s system, there’s a job description that says “translate customer needs into technical requirements.” The job behind those words is unrecognizable. The description hasn’t caught up.