Forget Job Titles, Staff Your Team by Archetype

I’ve been leading an engineering team long enough to know that the org chart lies. It tells you who reports to whom and what everyone’s title is, and almost nothing about how work actually gets done. The person titled “Senior Engineer” and the one titled “Staff Engineer” might do completely different kinds of work, and two people with the same title can be nothing alike.

So when Boris Cherny, the guy behind Claude Code, posted his take on the five archetypes he sees on his team, it stuck with me. It’s the mental model I’d been using for years without a name for it.

The idea is simple. As engineering, product, design, and data melt into a blurrier kind of role, the thing that actually matters isn’t your job function. It’s your archetype.

The five archetypes

Here they are, roughly as Boris framed them:

1. Prototyper - throws out brand new ideas, most of which never ship. High volume, low hit rate, and that is the point.
2. Builder - takes a prototype and turns it into real, production-grade product or infra. Fast.
3. Sweeper - cleans up the UI, simplifies the system, deletes code, unships, makes things quick.
4. Grower - takes something that has been built and iterates on it to chase product-market fit.
5. Maintainer - owns a mature system and keeps it secure, reliable, and efficient as it scales.

The part that clicked for me is that these aren’t tied to job function. I’ve got engineers who are natural Prototypers and engineers who are natural Sweepers, and on paper they’re both just “engineers”. Same for the designers, same for the PMs. The title is the costume. The archetype is the actor.

Most people span two, sometimes three. Nobody is purely one. But everyone leans somewhere, and pretending they don’t is how you end up asking your best Maintainer to go brainstorm ten new features, then wondering why they look miserable in every planning meeting.

Why this changes how I staff

Here’s the useful bit, the reason I’m writing this down instead of just nodding at a tweet.

A healthy team isn’t a pile of great individuals. It’s the right mix of archetypes for where the product actually is:

• New, pre-PMF wants Prototypers, Builders, Sweepers (1+2+3). You’re still figuring out what to build, so you need people who generate ideas, ship fast, and keep the mess from hardening.
• Growing, found PMF wants Builders, Sweepers, Growers, and a bit of Maintainer (2+3+4, some 5). Now it’s about iterating toward fit and starting to harden what works.
• Strong PMF wants Sweepers, Growers, Maintainers, and a bit of Builder (3+4+5, some 2). The game is scale, reliability, and squeezing more out of what you already have.

I’ve watched teams stall because they had the wrong mix for their stage. A pile of Prototypers on a mature product is chaos. A pile of Maintainers on a pre-PMF product is a graveyard of beautifully engineered things nobody wanted. Same people, wrong stage.

The uncomfortable question

Once you have the vocabulary, you have to point it at yourself.

I did. I’m a Builder who got pulled into a lot of Maintainer work by circumstance, and I’m genuinely happiest when I’m sweeping, simplifying, deleting, making things clean. That’s useful to know, because it tells me exactly what I should be delegating and what I should be protecting my own time for.

Titles will stick around, they’re too baked into comp and career ladders to vanish. But the way I actually think about my team now? That’s archetypes, not titles.