When Specialists Still Make Sense

What happens to the PM, the designer, and the engineer when a single person with a great idea can take it all the way to market on their own?

In this episode of Supra Insider, Ben Erez sits down with Tomer Cohen, former Chief Product Officer at LinkedIn, where he spent 14 years and led the company’s product transformation through the AI era. Tomer unpacks the full stack builder mindset - not as a job title, but as a fundamental rethinking of how product development works when the bloated, process-heavy model of the last two decades gets collapsed back down to its original building blocks: idea, build, ship.

They explore how Tomer actually rolled this out at LinkedIn across thousands of people, including replacing the traditional APM program with one where candidates submit a working product instead of a resume, and where the final interview is building something end to end in real time. He breaks down the three archetypes he sees emerging - system builders, full stack builders, and specialists - and what he observed clearly separating top performers from the rest: not their tooling, but their judgment. The conversation closes with a Q&A covering how to navigate interpersonal friction as roles blur, when you actually need a specialist to step in, and what skills will remain stubbornly human no matter what.

If you’re a PM, designer, or engineer trying to understand where your role is actually heading and what to do about it right now, trying to think clearly about how to future-proof your career without falling for hype, or curious how a CPO at one of the biggest tech companies in the world actually tried to operationalize this shift - this episode is for you.

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In this episode, we covered the following topics:

* (03:18) What the full stack builder mindset actually is and why now

* (04:00) How product development became a “massive behemoth” of process and org complexity

* (06:15) Collapsing the stack back to its original building blocks: idea to market

* (09:05) The GPT-4 moment: how Tomer’s team saw it coming and rewrote the LinkedIn roadmap overnight

* (13:00) How Tomer rolled this out at LinkedIn — from executive leadership first to the APB program

* (16:35) The new hiring process: submit a working product instead of a resume

* (20:07) What actually separated great candidates from good ones: judgment, not tooling

* (25:42) The three archetypes: system builders, full stack builders, and specialists

* (30:00) Your role is changing whether you want it to or not — and what to do about it

* (33:11) Why top talent at LinkedIn leaned in and everyone else didn’t — the growth mindset framing

* (035:55) The leadership hackathon: mandatory vibe coding for LinkedIn’s top R&D leaders

* (38:10) The role of human mentorship when AI can teach you almost anything

* (43:48) Q&A: when do you actually need a specialist to step in?

* (46:33) Q&A: navigating interpersonal friction as roles and lanes blur

* And more!

Links:

* Tomer Cohen’s Podcast: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/building-one-7160766300821069824/

* Tomer Cohen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomercohen/

* Marc: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcbaselga/

* Ben: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benerez/

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