Jane Austin: What will differentiate future product and design leaders?

With AI already having a significant impact on product careers, we recently spoke with Jane Austin, SVP at Contentsquare, about the skills the future generation of Product and Design Leaders need.

Transcript

I think the product and design leaders that will really thrive in the next three to five years are people who are comfortable with ambiguity and comfortable with very blurred boundaries because I see that there's going to be designers shipping code, engineers designing, product people doing design and strategy, and all of this is going to collapse.

If you're more of a T-shaped person, so if you're a designer that understands the code as you should, understands AI, understands the underlying data, or if you're a product person that understands systems and what good design looks like, or if you're an engineer that understands the business, that makes you much more employable. That's true today anyway. It's just more true in the future.

And so I really see the talent stack collapsing into people who are really strong all-rounders and who can harness AI to execute. But that strong breadth of knowledge allows you to think better, and the people who can think are the people who are going to win.