From role to skills: how Claude Code desilos the future of work

Proud milestone: so I submitted my first merge request to a software repo the other week. A real one, to a repo with real code, designed and built by real developers.

I’m the PO of a tiny team-of-three, which means that I’m wearing 6 different hats at the same time: PO, scrum master, business analyst, conversation designer, prompt engineer, UX-designer, test coordinator and general glue. Oh, that’s eight actually.

As a result I don’t have time for anything in terms of traditional deliverables, like wireframes, flow designs in Miro, epic docs, gherkin-like acceptance criteria. Which, in turn, means that by default, my work conflates into the smallest possible route towards value. And with Claude Code at my fingertips (and a very clear vision of the end result in my head), that means: building-as-specification-and-design.

So I turned to Claude Code. And what started out as a sketch for the ideal convo log analytics dashboard, soon turned into an interactive prototype. And when I fed it the specs and libraries that we use for front-end design and stubbed it with mock conversations, the easiest way to communicate that design to the team, was to simply commit it to the repo, so that our devs could pick it up from there.

This for me has been a pivoting point: ever since I started working, I’ve been trying to code: reading books, took so many courses, and somehow, it never stuck. Natural languages come so easy to me, but programming languages…I never managed to ‘get’ it.

And now, I feel all this stuff starts clicking into place: I tell Claude to keep a learning doc for all the work that I do, so I learn on the go. I tell it to spec in UML diagrams. I know how to write tests, so whenever I design, something, I write a few small tests to go with it. Turn all that into a Claude skill and hey…magic happens. My magic, because I know what I’m doing.

And of course, I check everything with my devs. Because they have a wealth of knowledge and experience in best practises that I don’t have. My lead developer will always have the final call. Does this make me a developer? No, absolutely not. My main focus and responsibility will always be on language-mediated user experience and the real user needs that our product needs to adress.

But I do find that Claude Code is the big de-silo-er of roles. Role as a construct has always felt limiting to me to begin with, causing unnecessary barriers to natural, efficient and playful collaboration.

What I see emerging: with GenAI as a mediating ecosystem where everybody can contribute to the joint product directely, rather than through intermediary artefacts, is a the start of a possible paradigm shift in the future of collaboration. From silo’d hierarchical roles with formal sign-offs on static products to dynamic skill configurations based on true expertise, with joint ownership of a headless ecosystem with fluid UI. If any.

Can’t wait!