Stages 5 and 6 hand whole product workflows to autonomous agents and then coordinate many at once. Each layer costs roughly seven times the one below, and crossing into it requires the technical depth most product roles have yet to build.

Stage 4 moves quality out of individual review and into automated gates inside shared workflows. Each product role becomes an architect or governor of the system, and the floor of competence rises to match the wider reach.

At Stage 3 each product role writes down how it actually works and encodes its standards into personal agents. The drafting load drops, the judgment load rises, and one person's definition of good becomes repeatable.

Product roles climb the same AI maturity curve as engineers. At Stage 2 every designer, analyst, owner, and PM has a capable assistant, the gains are real and personal, and nothing compounds until the team writes its craft down.