From Produced by Hand to Produced by Machine
It has rarely proved practical to produce exactly the same product by machines as we produced by hand. — Richard Hamming
Hamming wrote this line more than 30 years ago, long before LLMs were even a thought in people’s minds. I think it is one of the more useful frames for what is happening to knowledge work right now. When we move from hand production to machine production, the winning move is not to recreate the old process with faster tools. The winning move is to understand the essential job being done, then redesign the process around what the new machine makes possible.
Today I see only a few software development teams thinking through what a redesigned process might look like, and I have yet to come across someone who is actually talking about redesigning non-developer processes. So what would a Product Owner — or DRI, as Jack Dorsey calls them — look like from first principles?
- Owns the outcome, not the output
- Translates customer problems and pain into features for the internal team
- Spends a budget of team capacity and customer trust
- Makes decisions visibly, with reason, and quickly
- Has skin in the result — is rewarded based on the outcome, both positive and negative
- Shrinks the feedback loop between build and learn
- Says NO more than says YES
This role matters more in an AI-native organization, not less. As output gets cheaper, judgment becomes more valuable. More tickets can be written, more prototypes can be generated, and more features can be shipped into the void. The scarce thing is not production. The scarce thing is knowing what is worth producing.
The step change has already happened. It’s time we redesign the process.