"The behavior is no longer handed off across roles, but negotiated and iterated through prompt prototyping."
Gino Ferrand, writing today from Santa Fe, New Mexico 🌞
For decades, software teams operated like relay runners: designers passed specs to engineers, who passed features to QA, who passed finished builds to product. Everyone had a lane. Handoffs were the workflow.
Not anymore.
Thanks to generative AI, the walls between these roles are collapsing. And what’s replacing them is something far more fluid: shared prompt-driven workflows.
AI Is Forcing Cross-Functional Convergence
In a recent Stanford study, researchers observed teams working with AI and noticed something striking: developers, designers, and product managers all began collaborating through prompts.
At one company, designers used AI tools to scaffold UI code directly from Figma mocks. Engineers then picked up the scaffolds, refined the logic, and pushed updates in minutes...no handoff required. In another case, a product manager updated copy and layout styling directly via AI without routing the task through devs at all.
We’re not just seeing new productivity. We’re seeing something more foundational: a new language of collaboration.
That language is prompt-based.
The prompt is now the interface between roles. It’s the shared surface area. Anyone...PM, designer, engineer...can write a prompt. Anyone can generate, evaluate, and iterate on outputs. Instead of task delegation, it’s co-creation.
AI-Enabled Nearshore Engineers: The Ultimate Competitive Edge
The future of software engineering isn’t just AI... it’s AI-powered teams. By combining AI-driven productivity with top-tier remote nearshore engineers, companies unlock exponential efficiency at a 40-60% lower cost, all while collaborating in the same time zone.
✅ AI supercharges senior engineers—faster development, fewer hires needed
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Roles Aren’t Going Away...They’re Getting Fuzzy
Skeptics might worry that AI is making every role redundant. That’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is that roles are getting less territorial.
A designer writing basic CSS isn’t replacing a frontend engineer. A PM who tweaks the tone of an alert message using AI isn’t stepping on content or UX. What they are doing is compressing the loop. Instead of throwing tasks over the wall, they’re tightening the cycle of iteration.
From a team perspective, this can be an enormous unlock:
Fewer delays waiting on someone else’s bandwidth
Better alignment through shared language and faster feedback
Fewer meetings, because the work is moving through tools
And from a cultural standpoint, it can spark friction. Who owns the prototype? Who’s accountable for the copy? When anyone can touch anything, clarity becomes a leadership challenge.
What Engineering Leaders Should Watch For
This trend is still early, but the direction is clear: AI blurs the lines.
Here’s what to pay attention to:
Encourage collaboration without eroding accountability. Make it okay for a designer to submit a code prototype via AI...but still require engineering review. Encourage PMs to ideate features using AI, but require dev validation before moving forward.
Teach teams to co-prompt. Prompt writing is becoming the shared skill across functions. Facilitate sessions where PMs, designers, and engineers draft prompts together. Treat prompt engineering as a form of cross-functional communication.
Watch for tool fragmentation. If every role uses a different AI tool to “move faster,” it can cause chaos. Standardize on shared tools or interfaces (e.g., Cursor, Copilot, Claude) that support multi-role collaboration.
Redefine what handoffs mean. In AI-powered teams, a “handoff” might just be a shared prompt thread. Or a Slack message containing an AI-generated snippet. Document your team’s new rituals.
Champion mutual respect. It’s easy for technical contributors to bristle when non-engineers start touching code. It’s easy for PMs to get impatient when engineering wants more review cycles. The solution is cultural: emphasize shared ownership over perfectionism.
The Prompt Is Now the Collaboration Layer
For teams that embrace it, this shift can shrink timelines, boost alignment, and surface better ideas faster. It’s not about removing roles...it’s about overlapping them in ways that unlock compound productivity.
And as more teams learn to speak this new shared language of prompting, one thing is becoming clear:
The real future of collaboration isn’t meetings. It’s co-creation.
More to come…
Recommended Reads
✔️ How Prompt Review Systems Improve Team AI Workflows (PromptDrive)
✔️ Microsoft is racing to build an AI ‘agent factory’ (The Verge)
– Gino Ferrand, Founder @ TECLA