Agents broke the product org chart

One person with good tools can now build in days what a team used to spend a quarter on. I've done it, and I've watched others do it. Agents took away the hard part of building, and the org chart was drawn around that hard part.

The org chart is a theory of where value comes from. We drew the current one when building was expensive. Engineers built, PMs decided what to build, and designers shaped it. The people who could make the thing sat at the centre. Once building is cheap, a chart organised around who can build stops describing much.

What's scarce now is judgment. It takes 2 forms, deciding what's 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 has no way to show that part of the team is no longer human. Agents do the read, the draft and the check. The call stays human, with one owner for each decision.

The decision is a better unit of organisation than the function. Which segment to serve, what the pricing tier is and whether to pull the launch are all decisions, and each one carries exactly one name. Keep that list for a quarter and you'll learn more about your org than the chart has 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 between who carries over and who doesn't runs through the middle of each function.

A reorg redraws the boxes, and the boxes were never the problem. The people you need are already in your org, and the chart isn't pointing at them. Write down the decisions your org makes and put one owner on each. Note what was measured and what was still a bet. Then go back a quarter later and see which ones landed.