Is your role really dead? Is it time to go “full-stack?”

There’s a whole lot of “this or that role is dead” going around LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, you name it, these past few weeks.

Are you sure it’s dead? Or is it that the problems it was stuck on before are no longer holding it back?

We often focus so long on some problems that those problems become the identity of that role when the identity of a role is actually rooted in what value it sought to offer.

There’s also “it’s time to become a full-stack this or that.”

Are you sure you weren’t unaware of the true scope of that role and only now realizing what you could have been taking ownership of?

We often make our own definitions of roles and lose sight of what a role’s North Star is. Product management is one of the worst victims of this problem. I guarantee you, the more people you ask “what is product management” to you’ll find dozens of different answers; especially if you do justice to your sample size and ask people outside your circle.

I have a theory that statements like “this is the birth of full-stack somethings” and “that something is dead” are just excuses we’ve grown to use to side-step the truth that they lost sight of what it means to be a product manager, a developer, a project manager, <insert X role here>.

In plain and simple terms, we let problems, better yet, yesterday’s problems, define what a role is instead of the value it was intended to offer.

What do you think? Agree? Disagree? Agree to disagree?