The Manifesto
The Builder Maze Philosophy
Context
Artificial intelligence seems to be transforming roles in product development. The boundaries between professions are evolving, and some organizations are rethinking their structures. At the same time, recruiting junior profiles is becoming more difficult in several tertiary sectors. The market values versatile profiles, capable of working on multiple dimensions depending on the context. The professions of PM, Designer, and developer are based on distinct skills, but the market could evolve towards more hybrid roles. This evolution makes talent evaluation more complex with current approaches.
Observed Problem
We observe that CVs are often generated and sorted automatically, which can limit the evaluation of real capabilities. Establishing a reliable and reproducible evaluation of product talent remains complex. Comparing profiles with each other or measuring one's own progress remains difficult. Some companies focus on highly visible profiles, perhaps at the expense of other less detectable talents. The product recruitment market seems to be maturing, and a purely qualitative approach may no longer be sufficient to identify talents systematically.
Hypothesis
We are exploring the possibility of creating a quantifiable standard to evaluate the ability of product profiles to build revenue-generating products, independently of the CV or network.
Our Experiment
The Builder Maze is an attempt to create a reference framework for the capabilities of product team members to generate revenue through software development. We are testing this approach in the form of a structured global product creation competition. The goal is to allow each profile to position themselves against a common standard, progress on key skills, and be recognized for their actual performance.
Pain Points We Seek to Address
We want to test responses to the automatic generation of CVs that homogenizes profiles, to the difficulty of objective evaluation of product roles, to the absence of a common reference framework to compare different profiles, and to the lack of self-evaluation tools for product professionals.
Priorities and Design Choices
Faithfully reproducing the complexity of product development in a test environment seems impossible to us. We therefore choose to use AI to introduce a controlled element of randomness and simulate the entropy of a real product context. We design varied but comparable scenarios. Our intention is not to replace existing recruitment processes, but to add additional, generic, and quantitative data. The Builder Maze could become a complementary signal to interviews and internal evaluations.
Target
Profiles involved in software product development (PM, Designers, developers, hybrid profiles) wishing to evaluate themselves and progress. People in charge of recruitment and product talent management (recruiters, managers, HR).
Value We Seek to Provide
For talents: test themselves in a standardized environment, obtain a signal on their strengths and areas for improvement, gain visibility beyond the CV.
For companies: access a complementary signal on candidates, compare profiles on a common basis, identify less visible talents.
Storytelling
The Builder Maze was born from observations about the evolution of the product recruitment market and inspiration from the esports scene, where only performance matters. The name refers to Westworld, where the "maze" represents a complex path to the emergence of consciousness. We attempt to transform the chaos of product building into a measurable and fair playing field, where the value of a talent is demonstrated by what they build.