Top 12 in-demand jobs in product, engineering, and AI-powered innovation for 2024
By living and working with intelligent technologies, businesses and the humans that drive them will operate at a level far beyond our previous potential. We call this the autonomous age.
This will create a paradigm shift for humanity, positively impacting everything from the crops we grow, the products we use, to the way we live our lives.
To seize this opportunity, and to win in the autonomous age, businesses will require a different type of talent across product, engineering and innovation.
Here’s a comprehensive look at the top 12 in-demand jobs in these fields for 2024, co-created by three organizations: ML6, an AI consulting firm; BOI, an innovation and engineering consultancy for the autonomous age; and In Five Years, a talent studio specializing in product, engineering, and innovation talent.
Collaborating through Scrum
First, let’s explore how product management, engineering, and innovation/growth teams collaborate to achieve common goals efficiently. These departments typically apply an agile framework like Scrum to promote seamless teamwork and effective communication.
- Product Management defines the product vision and strategy, with the Product Owner prioritizing the backlog based on market needs and customer feedback.
- Engineering builds the product in iterative (biweekly) sprints, ensuring technical feasibility and quality through continuous integration and testing.
- Innovation / Growth teams are responsible for testing hypotheses to validate the business model and explore new revenue streams. By experimenting and developing new partnerships, they help the organization adapt and evolve, ensuring long-term growth and competitiveness.
Scrum’s ceremonies incl. daily stand-ups, sprint planning, and retrospectives facilitate communication and coordination, enabling these three disciplines to work together effectively. This collaborative approach results in high-quality, innovative products that meet market demands and drive business growth.
Key roles in Product, Engineering and Innovation teams
Successful digital and SaaS companies rely on diverse teams comprising experts in engineering, product management, and innovation. These professionals work collaboratively to develop cutting-edge solutions, optimize processes, and drive business growth.
AI-powered innovation & growth
As we transition towards a world where everything will become more autonomous, the products and services we imagine and the operating models that support them will also need to transition.
- Autonomous strategist: Autonomous strategists support senior leaders in this transformational moment creating exponential growth strategies that deliver hard-to-copy autonomous products, services, capabilities, and workflows.
- AI Transformation consultant: Operating at the AI-human interface level, AI transformation consultants help their clients imagine and create an AI-native operating model for the autonomous world across leadership, people, culture, technology, processes, and business models.
- AI-powered innovation consultant: AI-powered innovation consultants combine a broad set of AI tools with human ingenuity to imagine and create new products, services, and businesses that will drive the future growth of their clients.
- Entrepreneur in residence: They work on developing new business ideas and projects within the organization, often acting as a bridge between the startup/spinoff and corporate worlds. Working together with a range of autonomous agents they build the future portfolio of their clients.
Product management
In the autonomous age, the role of product management is more critical than ever. Product managers are tasked with envisioning products that leverage intelligent technologies to meet evolving market needs. They must navigate a rapidly changing landscape, balancing customer demands with technological possibilities to create products that are not only innovative but also seamlessly integrated into autonomous systems.
- Product managers: Product managers are the visionaries who define the strategy, roadmap, and features of a product. They work closely with cross-functional teams to ensure that the product meets market needs and business goals in the long run.
- Product owners: Product owners are responsible for maximizing the value of the product by managing the product backlog and ensuring that the development team delivers features that align with customer needs and business objectives.
- UX/UI managers: UX/UI managers oversee the design and user experience of digital products. They ensure that the interface is intuitive, user-friendly, and aligned with the brand’s aesthetic.
- Service designers: Service designers focus on the end-to-end experience of a service. They design and optimize the interactions between customers and the company across all touchpoints.
Engineering
Working as an engineer in the fast evolving tech world we’re living in now, requires quite some change management and adaptation skills. The role of a Machine Learning Engineer for example, is not the same anymore as a couple of years ago. With the AI market evolving fastly, so do the job needs.
It’s important to note that an engineering role differs from a scientist role. An engineer brings things into production for real client or industry use cases, and also works on architecture and cloud infrastructure for example.
Within the tech engineering space, there are way more available engineering roles than only the one of an ML Engineer. Which ones?
- Software Engineers: Software Engineers build and deploy robust software systems for (ML) solutions (frontend and backend) and deliver production ready applications.
- Data Engineers: Data engineers build scalable data pipelines and cloud infrastructure using a dynamic and cutting-edge tech stack.
- Machine Learning Engineers: ML Engineers use, for example, Python to deploy production ready pipelines and ML models (on for example major cloud providers). The role of an ML Engineer is changing fast, where focus will be on the deployment, engineering and software part, instead of only building and training new ML models.
- Customer Engineers: Customer Engineers translate business needs into technical solutions and the other way around. They are the bridge between tech and business units and love to inspire people with the latest technologies.
Bringing Autonomous Innovation to life
We envision, build and roll out autonomous innovation engine for our clients, across industries. Check out how we work with two of our clients on autonomous innovation.
Leading CPG company
Working with a leading CPG company on transforming Innovation and building towards an Autonomous Growth Engine
Major global fashion retailer
Working with a major global retailer to reimagine how clothing is made, bought and sold in an AI-native way
Keen to join our team and be at the forefront of AI x Innovation? Drop us a note!
