I’ve spent nearly twenty years moving in and out of industries that weren’t built for modern software from restaurant supply chains, auto retail, live events and ticketing, edtech and more. The thing I continue to find to be true is that product leadership isn’t a seniority level that you attain. It’s a practice you either keep doing or just find that you stopped doing once other things take your attention away. Here are a few points that I hold close as product management evolves in the age of AI.
Walk the walk, regardless of altitude
This is just a “I can’t help myself” type thing, but it’s also a stylistic choice. No matter the org, size, scale etc. I just love being close to problems and the teams solving them. Now, when you’re on a team of 10 that is different than a team of 100 vs a team of 500 but the constants remain. Get close to real problems and help give people clarity, purpose and context. To do this with 10 is easier to do organically and at 100 it has to be true system that is implemented and measured rigorously.
This also shows intent to your teammates. Be willing (and able) to dig in and add something in many different conversations and surface areas. Know when you’re just talking to be heard vs have something to say, but be present and model the behaviors you expect from those around you.
Judgment is more important than ever
With AI enabling people to do more on their own than ever, the irony is that teams are more misaligned than ever. Product inherently must be the role that helps to navigate and solve this. Ironically, in some recent years, product as a function become helping to manage and hone the flow of information around a company instead of making high value product decisions. That’s still important work, but it’s not the entire role.
As AI has collapsed the cost to build software and, has created more velocity, that velocity doesn’t inherently mean better products. Therefore, the craft of product management is now more critical than it ever has been. Judgment, simply, whether a product should be built one way or another, how to solve a customer problem and rapidly moving towards that goal and assessing efficacy is far more important than ever. Think of this as the next phase of systems thinking, which is still incredibly important.
Expertise + Wisdom = Judgment. Can you be hands on, close to the work, speak the language of the leaders and on the ground teams in a company and bring credibility to the table based on your experience?
Building is fun again
Layering onto that point above, building can be fun again. With the right team, the right judgment and the right framework, high functioning product people can be super builders as well. The same is true for designers and engineers. This requires the right guardrails to be in place in order to not just produce slop, and this gets into a thesis I hold that senior people with these skills are going to be increasingly more valuable than ever. Conversely, you can also just build slop and annoy teams with a half baked Lovable prototype, so know the team, know your role and operate with taste. This can also mean building things that are not the product itself. It can be building to manage the information overload, make the SDLC more efficient and effective etc. This will evolve rapidly in the next 3, 6, 9 and 12 months. What once was overhead, now is automated and the role of the PM can be to build systems that make this possible, so their time can be spent on high leverage product work.
AI is changing how everyone in build organizations spends their time but not the value of skills
I come from a technical product background. For the beginning of my career that meant a line existed that was rarely crossed: I could reason about systems, but writing the code or designing the schema was someone else’s job, and there was a gap between us. Tools that turn natural language into working queries, into working prototypes, into working infrastructure changes, mean a product leader today can engage more meaningfully here than ever before.
This now means that the floor for what a non-engineer can credibly reason about has risen, which means the bar for what counts as genuine technical partnership from a product leader has risen with it. Be credible in these discussions. (The same is also true within the context of design).
“Traditional” PMs might be in trouble
PMs who are information movers, are well organized and help to solely deliver software will be in trouble. In the same way that high leverage engineers whose greatest skillset is the syntax of the code or a specific language will be heavily commoditized. Those who think systematically, have strong judgment, can drive alignment and tastefully build collaboratively with those around them will thrive. This is not a doomsday prediction but it is an extreme overhaul of the function, and all of us have to work hard to keep up.
Trust is the actual operating condition
I’ve learned this one the hard way. It’s easy to look at an opportunity on paper and think “I can take this on” and to discount the human layer at a business. This can lead to a very negative outcome, and this has happened in my career and served as a core learning. This has led me to further believe that the fit and trust within a team, especially in times of change, are the most critical things. Product work, more than most functions, depends on people being willing to say “I think this is a mistake” out loud, before it’s expensive to fix and to drive focus on the right things. Those companies that listen to this, expect the product and “the business” to be synonymous and complement each other will thrive. Or perhaps that’s where I thrive vs a service and delivery mindset that still holds many organizations. Know which one you want to optimize for and the behaviors that earmark both.
Progress, not just progression
I now think about what kind of progress a role or a decision actually enables; sometimes that’s a product decision or judgment, sometimes it’s learning, sometimes it’s just getting to do the actual work again instead of managing the managers who do it. I’d rather focus where there’s a genuine step toward solving an important problem with people I trust.
Each of these items may become their own posts in the future. They’ve been seeds bouncing around for some time that I decided to write down and hit publish on now, but there’s more depth on each of them that I want to share more about.
Happy building.