AI can help an individual move quickly. Great products also depend on people building a shared understanding of the problem.
Voltron offers a useful metaphor for this kind of collaboration. Each machine had a human pilot, and each pilot used that system to extend their own abilities. The same system connected the machines, combining those distinct strengths into something more powerful than any one pilot could create alone.
In the age of AI, product teams should strive to work more like Voltron.
Designers, engineers, researchers, product leaders, and subject-matter experts bring different perspectives. Their roles naturally overlap while each discipline contributes its own experience, judgment, and expertise.
This way of working predates today’s generative AI tools. At iRobot, cross-functional partnership was sometimes described as a three-legged stool. The metaphor emphasized balance and the importance of different disciplines supporting one another. Voltron feels better suited to the AI era because the same system that amplifies each individual can also connect the team.
Combining those perspectives led to some of our best work at iRobot. Research clarified the balance between human judgment and robot autonomy and helped frame the mental models customers brought to the experience. Engineering defined and expanded what the robot could do through advances in autonomy, mapping, and connected systems. Product connected customer needs to business priorities. Design brought those inputs together into an experience that felt familiar and understandable.
Those collaborative practices should continue as AI becomes more capable, but teams will also need to keep evolving how they work together. The easier path is to flatten roles around a common set of tools. The harder and more valuable work is to use those tools while preserving the distinct strengths, experience, and judgment each person brings.
AI can expand the possibilities within every discipline. By amplifying those individual contributions and connecting them across the team, it can open new forms of innovation that no single discipline could reach alone.
That approach will take more effort, but it will be worth the squeeze.
Different human pilots. Unique strengths. One shared machine.