Silber: Product teams still need dedicated PM, design, and engineering specialists
Ian Silber · Chatbots are not the final interface: OpenAI’s Head of Design on what’s next | Ian Silber · Aug 16, 2026 · at 19:46
OpenAI head of product design Ian Silber discusses the debate over whether AI tooling will collapse PM, design, and engineering into generalized builder roles.
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“I do still think that, and maybe this is thinking about it from like a slightly larger company perspective, but I think you do still need people that have certain responsibilities, right? Because if you have one person that's expected to design, to rally a team around something, you know, to align a whole company to do all the work that like a PM does, for example, and also be designing it and also be engineering it. It's just maybe not, you know, you might, it might be hard to find one person that's good at all of those different skills. And so I still find a lot of value, for example, in having like an excellent PM that can help rally multiple teams together, that can help sharpen kind of the perspective or the problem space that a team is focused on. That can help with like resourcing and all of those things, right? And so I do think there will still be value in these and people focused on different parts of building a project or a product.”
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