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CP Clay Parker Jones On Finding Our Way

“In large organizations, so much of the conversation ends up being about, oh, well, we don't have role clarity. And it's something people say when they are trying not exactly to avoid taking action, but it often allows people to do that.”

Finding Our Way · User Experience · October 2026

“In large organizations, so much of the conversation ends up being about, oh, well, we don't have role clarity. And it's something people say when they are trying not exactly to avoid taking action, but it often allows people to do that.” — Clay Parker Jones, Finding Our Way

Summarizing his essay "The End of Role Clarity." He argues that as AI lets more people do work outside their job titles, a clear team purpose and working agreements matter more than perfectly separated roles.

Transcript

Finding Our Way Around 13:20 into the episode
Clay Parker Jones

Sure.

Peter Merholz

…we get into a dialogue, I think it would be good for those who haven't had a chance to read it if you could just share the thesis. It's a long enough article, so I'm sure you're going to have to elide some details. But what is your high-order thesis when you were writing the end of role clarity?

Clay Parker Jones

Yeah. In large organizations, so much of the conversation ends up being about, oh, well, we don't have role clarity. And it's something people say when they are trying not exactly to avoid taking action, but it often allows people to do that. We're not going to take advantage of this opportunity because we don't have role clarity, because I'm not sure if that person over there is supposed to be doing that thing that they're doing that I think I should be doing. And it's getting in the way of us being able to make a good decision. And I wanted to offer with that piece this alternative view, which I think is more and more plausible or…

Peter Merholz

The heart of your thesis is something that I think I tried to reflect on when I wrote org design for design orgs and in my own design leadership practice. And Jesse and I have talked about recently, even when we were back at Adaptive Path, where we tried to have just one role. You're an experienced…

Clay Parker Jones

Yeah, that's a very good question. And I'm happy that you, it's okay to disagree with a thing, too. I appreciate that it sparked this because it is worth debating and it's worth digging into. I think in the three things that you identified, two of them are really good and worth maintaining as we…

Jesse James Garrett

Peter touched on our experiences wrestling with some of this stuff at Adaptive Path. And one of the things about that experience was, honestly, it pretty much worked. We had some challenges. We had some challenges with people who, going back to the identity thing, their identity wasn't just…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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