From Product Tripod to Pogo Stick - ProductFTW #89

I've been the whole product team before. The org chart said product manager, but what I actually did was… a lot more: I wrote the spec, mocked up screens because we didn't have a designer, wrote the backend business logic, and created the SQL reports myself because asking eng was a sprint-and-a-half of work. If you’ve worked at a startup, I’m sure this sounds familiar because you've lived it.

Last month, big tech made this dynamic official. Coinbase announced it was cutting 14% of its staff and introducing one-person teams: a single person acting as engineer, designer, and product manager, backed by AI. Then, Block cut 40% of its roles while their CEO published a piece questioning whether companies need human hierarchy at all. Now, LinkedIn has converted its Associate Product Manager program into a "Product Builder" program that trains new hires across product, design, and engineering simultaneously. 

That accidental one-person team is becoming deliberate org design, and with it, the product tripod is collapsing into a single role. 

Why the tripod existed in the first place

The classic product team is a tripod: a PM, a designer, and an engineering team, each a leg holding up the work. The tripod existed because each leg was a discipline that took a career to build. PMs held the business context and served as the customer's voice. Engineers held the tech. Designers held the craft of making software usable. Building good products required all three, and no single person could hold all three at professional depth. So we split them across people and paid the coordination tax, the PRDs and handoffs and sprint planning, as the cost of doing business.

This paradigm held for decades because the constraint was that expertise was expensive to acquire and impossible to fake. Now, AI has broken the constraint, but not the disciplines themselves.

The case for the pogo stick

Whichever leg of the tripod you started on, the distance to the other two has collapsed. An engineer can now get to credible design and decent customer synthesis in months instead of years. A designer can direct an implementation they couldn't have written themselves. The three disciplines still exist, and you still need all three to build good products, they just don’t require three bodies.

A skilled person with AI tooling ships with a speed and coherence the traditional three-way team can't match. There's no handoff loss. There's no design-by-committee sanding the edges off a good idea. The vision in your head is the vision you ship. A competent builder can go from idea to design to code to prod in days, sometimes hours, at quality that would have taken a full team a quarter to reach. The people who develop competency across all three legs are going to thrive. The specialists who refuse to develop the other two won't have a role to hide in much longer.

So, the tripod is becoming a pogo stick, with one point of contact with the ground. It's much faster, much more maneuverable, and requires constant balance from the person on it.

What the tripod was actually doing

The pogo stick is going to get more common, but I don't think it's the end state, and at scaled companies it may never be the right answer. The tripod is doing something that’s easy to take for granted.

Each leg held a load-bearing competency, and competent peers raised each other's floor. The designer says "I watched three users miss that button." The engineer says, "that's three months for an edge case, let’s do something different." Every bad idea I've shipped got worse in isolation, and every good one got sharper because someone I respected pushed back before a customer ever saw it.

Your AI replaces none of this because it's the most agreeable "peer" you'll ever have. It optimizes for your satisfaction, not the product's quality. It never quits in protest, never sighs in a design review, never tells you your feature idea sucks. It will build the wrong thing beautifully, at scale, on demand.

That changes where bad ideas go to die. On a tripod team, they died in review, on Tuesday, for free. On a pogo stick, nothing dies until users ignore it. The feedback loop moves from "a peer catches it this week" to "the metrics catch it next quarter." You ship faster and learn slower. Compound that across a roadmap and you get the thing everyone's started calling slop: high-volume, well-rendered, useless garbage. The artifacts of design and product thinking are all there, but the craft and judgment behind them isn't.

So if you're riding the pogo stick, whether by ambition or by layoff, the job is to manufacture the friction you no longer get for free. Prompt your AI to attack your plan before it executes it; make it argue the case against the feature, and make yourself respond. Recruit one human who sees the work before it ships: a customer, an advisor, your cofounder, anyone whose face you'll have to look at when it's wrong. And write down your kill criteria before you build, because after you've built, you'll rationalize anything.

None of this is as good as a great designer across the table or a 10x engineer ripping apart your PRD. It's the cheap substitute. But the cheap substitute beats nothing, and nothing is the default.

Balance is the job now

I don't know if "product manager" will survive as a title. Product management as a discipline will exist forever (see PFTW #1), and design and engineering aren’t going anywhere either. Someone still has to know the customer and the business, someone still has to make the thing usable, and someone still has to make it work. The only open question is how many bodies those disciplines live in.

A tripod stands on its own. A pogo stick stays up only as long as the rider keeps their balance, and balance here means keeping all three disciplines honest when there's no peer left to do it for you. The one-person teams that thrive won't be the ones most skilled across the disciplines. They'll be the ones who know which of their legs is weakest and build the friction back in on purpose. Everyone else is about to ship slop faster than ever before.

About ProductFTW

ProductFTW is a biweekly newsletter about product management, with a focus on real-life experiences in startups. We want to help product leaders be successful by giving realistic approaches that aren’t for giant tech companies. We know you don’t have a full-time product designer on each team. We know your software probably hasn’t been used by millions of people worldwide–yet. We’re here to bridge the content gap from building your product and team to scaling it.