David Hoang, writing for Proof of Concept, proposes a squad model for tackling a company’s hardest, most ambiguous problems:
The squad: a forward deployed engineer, a forward deployed designer, and a researcher. Three people. That’s it. They operate like a startup-within-the-company, deployed against a specific, ambiguous problem. […] This is a product discovery team with teeth — they don’t just produce insights and hand them off. They produce working prototypes and validated direction. […] Three people don’t need standups, retros, or Jira boards. They need a shared problem and a whiteboard.
No PM. The shared problem replaces the roadmap, and a researcher replaces the product manager. Hoang borrows the concept from Palantir’s Forward Deployed Engineers and extends it to design. His argument: AI tools have given designers enough technical leverage to prototype at engineering speed, so the designer who finds the problem can build the first cut of the solution.
A three-person team with AI tools in 2026 can cover the ground that used to require a ten-person cross-functional team. That’s the direct result of collapsing the build cost of exploration.
Hoang argues that the rotation model matters as much as the squad composition. Four to eight weeks, then disband. The team doesn’t calcify into a feature factory. Designers rotate through the company’s hardest problems instead of sitting on the same product team filing tickets for years.
Although, my counter to that would be designers sitting in the same problem space will gain deeper knowledge and context. Rotation could be counterproductive if not handled deliberately.
