Weekend Reflections #15 | The Title You Were

[Views are my own]

Last week, Arin Bhowmick published a piece on the identity crisis in design. We ended up in a thread together, moving from blurred role boundaries to the artifacts that make expertise legible, and then to judgment and evaluation systems.

The kind of conversation I genuinely enjoy. Then it ended, and a different question stayed with me: why did we build our professional identity on something that was never designed to carry it?

Design may be the canary. Similar boundary erosion is appearing across technology roles: product managers, architects, analysts, developers. Different speeds, but a related direction. Design may be the clearest early signal because its artifacts have traditionally been among the most visible.

I hear a version of this in many conversations about AI right now.

Alongside the fear of losing the job, there is another fear. Harder to name. Losing who we are. The job was not just employment. It was the answer to the question: What do you do? And underneath that, barely hidden: Who are you?

"I am a PM." "I am a designer." "I am an engineer." "I am an architect."

We rarely give the full answer. We offer the identity that the context knows how to process. At work, the title becomes the compressed version of the person: legible, comparable, searchable.

The title starts as something we use. Eventually, it becomes something we are.

"You are not your job" is the standard reassurance. It assumes a self waiting beneath the role, ready to emerge when the role is taken away. The harder claim is that this self may never have been separately articulated, because constructing it was never the task. Selecting the right box was.

The box came pre-validated: a recognizable shape, a career trajectory, a social contract. You stepped in and borrowed its identity. Efficient, and invisible as a choice, because the container held. You could even move between containers without confronting what the move meant. The new box did the same work as the old one. You never had to name what existed underneath.

The boxes were not built around the full capabilities, interests, or potential of the people inside them. They were built around units of work organizations needed, then standardized enough to make roles legible and comparable. A common substrate for writing a vacancy, evaluating a candidate, and benchmarking a salary.

The title created portability, not precision.

You notice this most clearly when you try to explain your job to your parents, or to a friend in a different industry. The title that appears so meaningful inside an organization suddenly carries almost no detail. It is a code, legible only to people who already understand the system around it. A product manager in one company might own strategy and commercial outcomes. In another, the same title might mean managing delivery or translating decisions made elsewhere.

Everyone accepted the approximation because it made the system easier to operate. Most people outside that system eventually stop asking.

That arrangement held while the containers held.

The crisis is not only "I lost my job." It is more specific: the containers are deforming. They are shrinking, merging, collapsing. And the person inside discovers they were never the container's author. They were its tenant. When the structure fails, it can feel as if there is nothing underneath. Not only because something was taken away, but because what existed there was never named separately from the container.

We mistook the title's portability for precision. Then, somewhere along the way, we mistook that precision for identity.

I am a VP of Product.

What does that mean, exactly?

It means I hold a role, in an organization, at this point in time. It says something about level, scope, accountability. These things are real. But they are not what I am.

I have moved between roles that looked very different on paper. Across them, I kept relying on the same instinct: find the thing underneath the visible problem, name it precisely, and follow it until it becomes useful. That instinct did not come from any one role. It was present before them and survived each transition.

If that is the pattern I carry, then the title is where I have been applying it. Not where it lives.

When I moved from one container to another, the market value of some of what I knew shifted. I had to translate things, sharpen them, express them differently in a new context. But the underlying pattern did not change with the title.

The role used those things. It was never those things.

AI did not create the underlying mismatch. It is exposing it and accelerating the conditions that make it harder to ignore.

Organizations use professional titles to organize work and make labor legible across teams and companies. We then ask those titles to carry our sense of self. They were never built for that weight.

What AI is doing, specifically, is reducing the signaling value of the artifact layer that made the old categories appear stable. The wireframes, the PRDs, the specs, the diagrams.

Titles appeared stable partly because roles were associated with recognizable outputs. AI makes those outputs easier to produce across role boundaries. Once the output becomes weaker evidence of where the value came from, the title becomes a less reliable explanation of contribution.

I wrote in The Molting about roles shedding their execution layer. The question I did not ask then: what happens when the execution layer was also the identity layer?

When the first version of an artifact becomes cheap to produce, the evidence of expertise moves elsewhere: towards the problem someone chose to solve, the constraints they noticed, the trade-offs they made visible. Expertise does not disappear. Its evidence moves.

And as role boundaries blur, something that was already true becomes impossible to ignore. The crisis has two layers. AI may change or remove existing roles, even as it creates new ones. At the same time, it is exposing how much identity many of us placed inside roles that are now changing shape.

What remains when the title loses its stability is not a fixed inventory. Skills change. Experience ages. Some instincts become more valuable; others need to be unlearned.

What remains is the way you see. The problems you notice. The questions you ask before others realize there is a question. The judgment built through decisions that worked and decisions that did not. The things people come to you for that no job description has ever named.

That, too, will develop through the work, the context, and the choices you make. But it remains yours, not the container's.

Your skills, your judgment, your way of seeing: the container helped shape them, but it never owned them. They were never the container's to take.

The container will change. What you built inside it can outlast it.