Agents broke the product org chart

The org chart is a theory of where value comes from. We drew the current one when building was the expensive part: engineers built, PMs decided what to build, designers shaped it. The people who could make the thing sat at the centre.

Agents took the hard part away. One person with good tools can build in days what a team spent a quarter on. I have done it, and I have watched others do it. A chart organised around who can build stops describing much.

What is scarce now is judgment, in two forms: deciding what is worth building, and knowing whether what shipped landed. Both were always in the job. Neither was the constraint, so neither showed up in the boxes. The chart also cannot show that part of the team is no longer human. Agents do the read, the draft, and the check. What stays human is the call: one decision, one owner.

That gives you a better unit of organisation than the function: the decision. Which segment to serve. What the pricing tier is. Whether to pull the launch. Each one carries exactly one name. Run that list for a quarter and you will learn more about your org than the chart ever told you.

The people who carry over are the ones with taste, and taste is spread across every function. An engineer who always had a view on what was worth building is worth more now. A PM who ran process is exposed. So is a designer who shipped pixels without a point of view. The line runs through the functions, not between them.

The claim

The line runs through the functions, not between them.

A reorg will not fix this, because the boxes were never the problem. Write down the decisions your org makes. Put one owner on each. Note what was measured and what was still a bet, and go back a quarter later to see which ones landed. The people you need are already in your org. The chart is not pointing at them.