I think it’s obvious that with Ai we will see a fundamental change in how we organize and Structure Teams. This post follows one ticket through a German Scrum team and shows where that path breaks. In short, roles will merge; you will not have an Isolated Developer, Designer or Business person anymore. These merged roles will also use agents to ship new features, fix bugs and verify the result.
Now before we go deeper on how exactly this will change let’s first look back at how most German Companies were developing Software pre ai. In most Projects where I was, we had many different Roles:
- Developers (converting Tickets into code, fixing bugs, improving the codebase)
- Po / Ba People (doing requirement Engineering, talking to shareholders, customers)
- Designers (Translating the ideas that Ba People had into Screens)
- Devops (Setting up Infra)
- Qa (Helping with Testing and Quality)
While not every Project has a Designer, you can also have variations like:
Dev + Business
Dev + Business + Designers
and each additional Role in Theory should make the Product better. Which makes sense. I was in a Project where we had no Designer and every Site looked Different.
Now since implementation took time and was costly, to plan how much we could ship in a week, we did estimations.
ESTIMATIONS NEVER WORK !!!
Now with Ai the cost of implementing a Ticket dropped drastically. Yes you still have to pay with Tokens. But in my experience, both at Work and Privately, what would have taken me a week can now be done in 30 Minutes.
In a week for Fun I also created my own clone of one of my Favorite Games Factorio:
Now most companies that still run in the old way also see that they gain some Productivity gains, but in total they don’t ship 4-8 times more Features or fix Bugs. The reason is if we still stick to Isolated Roles we will still have handoffs, many meetings and alignments that take much time.
A simple Example:
Customer Stakeholder wants X A Busniness Person is doing requirement Engineering and trying to figure out how to solve X.
Some Days spent, they now maybe need Feedback from a designer on how the Solution should look. Another Meeting.
Now they maybe need Feedback about Technical Details, another Meeting.
After some Days Weeks the Ticket is finally ready for implementation.
Now a Developer will be the Meat Proxy copy paste the Ticket into the Clanker and the implementation is done.
So time wise
Alignment on how we want to ship it took 90 % of the time while implementation took only 10 %.
Before Ai it was roughly 50 / 50: the meetings stayed the same, only the coding got shorter.
Would it not be faster if one person talked to the customer and built the whole feature alone, without any alignment?
Ofc this will not work with everyone. Some People don’t have the skills yet to be a Generalist with High Agency. Some Devs are used to going with whatever Business People say, don’t care about that Part. But the skill those Devs rely on, turning tickets into code without asking why, is no longer needed. Nobody cares if you can solve leet code Problems anymore.
So what should you do?
Depending on your current Role, try to get better at the other Side.
A designer with discerning taste should learn the basics of setting up a frontend project, so they can run their own agent and build prototypes directly in the codebase. A business person should learn to work with Ai, pick up some technical basics such as Git, clone the team’s project, and set it up to run locally.
Do Vibe Coding
Ofc Developers show interest in how your company is making Money think which Features can help to solve Problems. Also try to make your codebase bulletproof so Agents can work without your help.
The Future for People that like to build Software looks Promising.
The Future for Devs who don’t love writing and reading Code by hand looks bleak.