The Role of Role
What a team learns from its specialists
What does a Product Manager do? All of the critical things that nobody else is doing.
What does a Developer do? All of the critical things that nobody else is doing.
What does a Founder do? All of the critical things that nobody else is doing.
Great work happens when somebody recognizes a critical opportunity, understands how to act on it, and takes it upon themselves to do so. Title is never the primary driver of someone’s impact. What matters is what we notice. What we notice is shaped by where we have been.
Some of the best developers I’ve worked with started as architects, designers, or physicists. They had always coded for fun, to get their jobs done faster, and for more autonomy. At some point they officially changed roles and other people started viewing them differently. The org chart changed but their instincts didn’t. A designer-turned-developer may not be allowed to design without an official designer in the room, even though their design sense didn’t go anywhere.
A similar phenomenon happens through collaboration. Many organizations create hand-off moments between designers and developers, but the best solutions come from roles deeply understanding each other’s values through close, iterative relationships. This creates solutions that satisfy everyone’s goals even when no individual role would have proposed them in isolation. After a sufficiently long collaboration, each role learns to predict the other’s concerns. This ability will stick with a developer after the designer leaves the team, in the same way that a role change doesn’t erase the remnants of an old role.
Old roles don’t fully leave. They remain as ghosts on the team.
That is why experienced engineers get more out of coding models than vibe coders do. LLM users still need the right instincts when reacting to the model, even when they don’t need to directly write code. Models are primarily trained on what got shipped rather than the judgment calls that led to a particular solution. The experienced engineer brings instincts that a vibe coder never developed.
The underappreciated value of specialists is the imprint they leave on everyone around them. I’ll always prefer real people, but teams with enough ghosts are able to recognize good work in areas that they don’t staff. They are more able to hire for those areas. A team can’t avoid doing design just because they don’t have a designer, but the taste and value system left by close relationships with a designer gives them a fighting chance.
Which is what a small team, or a solo founder, needs: enough ghosts in the room to know good work when they see it.