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Composite roles replace specialists
In go to market, the same person handles the business negotiation, the demo, and the use cases, instead of splitting that work between account executives, solution engineers, and sales solution architects. The expectation is more and more generalization of roles, away from specialization.
That means smaller teams delivering the same work as before. A company has to do ten times the work to get the same amount of revenue from its customers, so the smaller team is forced to do more.
Some roles are expected to go away. Data analysts who are not business thinkers, who build specific dashboards or configure backend systems on request, are one example, because business owners will get answers to their questions directly. Recruiting sourcers are another, folded into full-cycle recruiting roles.
Why did companies specialize roles in the first place?
Adam Smith opened The Wealth of Nations in 1776 with a pin factory. He wrote that ten workers each doing one or two steps could make about 48,000 pins a day, while a single worker doing every step might not make even twenty. Repeating one task builds speed, and nobody loses time switching between tools. Specialization also let firms hire people for narrow skills.
What happened to jobs when spreadsheets arrived?
VisiCalc, released in 1979, was one of the first spreadsheet programs, and it automated arithmetic that clerks had done by hand. Clerical bookkeeping work shrank in the years that followed. Accounting and financial analysis grew, because cheap calculation made it practical to ask many more questions of the numbers. Economists often cite it as an example of a tool that reshaped jobs rather than simply removing them.
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