The Merholz Agenda

The "AI is blurring roles" and "[role] is dead" discourse occurring across a thousand LinkedIn posts simply restates an issue has been apparent for decades, but companies have been unwilling to address: in knowledge work, the role was always the wrong unit of organization.

Until we move past it, even with new capabilities, we'll be stuck in old ways of thinking about work.

I believe a superior model of organization features two prongs:

• Skills and their associated activities (the true organizational atoms)
• Teams (which is how skills, through their practitioners, are realized in practice)

This became clear to me years ago as I shifted from working in design consulting to working in-house. To design good software requires a wide variety of skills, more than any individual can excel at:

But product squads typically had single designers embedded within them. The unfortunate organizational hack was staffing Product Designers who were strong in visual and interaction design, but weak in everything else. And this meant software quality suffered–it may look good, but it didn't work all that well.

If you have