What will be AIs impact on the shape of multidisciplinary product teams?
Giuseppe has just published this interesting post about mapping AI outcomes/activities against the goals of each point of the Service Standard.
Which particularly piqued my interest as just yesterday I was catching up with Ollie and when I wasn’t bemoaning my existence and requirement to still work for a living (my default these days) I was pondering what I might be doing if I was 10/15 years younger – mid career and still ambitious.
The answer I landed on was probably investigating the way “AI” might disrupt the orthodoxy of team shapes and ways of working in agile, multi-disciplinary teams. Is the unit of delivery the team in the AI era?
Now I’m obviously looking at this from a couple of very particular lenses. Firstly that of a product person (and in an ocean of ideas about what that means I liked Chris’s recent attempt to define his view of the role) and someone who almost exclusively operates in a world of teams defined by the GDaD (fka DDaT) Professional Framework job description and how those roles find themselves deployed in a ‘Service Standard/Manual’ influenced environment.
I wonder if this job description I came across recently – for Tech Against Terrorism – is a glimpse into the future? It reimages the role of product as prototyper-in-chief, powered by Claude, building at the speed of thought and then working with engineering to scale and secure…and no mention of design or research roles at all!
To what extent will UCD be shaken up? I read with concern about Ministers using synthetic audiences to test their messaging for speeches…is it a big leap before teams are pressured to do similar for user research? Will the brilliant work on the GOVUK Design System backfire and empower designer free teams to build out ‘uncanny valley’ services that look okay on first glances but with no idea of the nuance or thinking behind why things are the way they are you soon identify the wrongness…or maybe not soon enough.
Does UR return to the days of reactive usability testing?
On the more positive side can AI (and its agents) finally free URs from the admin burden? Does it change the shape of ResearchOps and provide more time and room for contact with real users?
Content Design already spends more time than it should fighting its corner (which is bonkers – it provides more bang for buck in improving services than any other profession IMHO) but it feels, again, at risk from AI advocates who just think it is a case of generating some words and do not comprehend the art & science involved in doing it well.
Do engineers become the clean-up crew? Does QA finally really get its due? Cyber and things like ‘Secure by Design’ definitely need to get much, much closer to the day to day concerns.
Do teams get leaner? This would not necessarily be a bad thing – (perceived) compliance with the Service Standard has created a tendency towards bloated teams at certain stages – seeking to fill every job title as rather than cover the capabilities at any given time. The concept of a ‘minimal viable team’ is powerful – but rare.
Or do teams just change shape not size – do the rings of Emily’s Team Onion start to merge/blend? Do roles previously seen as ‘Collaborators’ increasingly become core? Do previous ‘Core’ roles fade away or become the responsibility of a different, evolved, role?
What about the Agile™ of it all? I once worked with someone (hi Tony) who loved the idea of one day sprints! Does this AI era start making that more common? What does creating user stories look like with these tools? Acceptance criteria? Generating decent BDD/GivenWhenThen statements? Status updates? Weeknotes?
As you can tell from reading this I don’t have any answers, just lots of questions and my share of ideas…so yes, if I was (much) younger, I think I’d be trying to work this out by trying things out. Seeing what worked, whether it makes a difference, if so where.
Hopefully some of you are on the case.
I look forward to reading the AI generated transcript of the podcast I won’t listen to about it all at some point 😂
