I expect there to be a lot of speculation and experimentation with “product management” as AI changes the technological landscape. I had the good fortune to cross paths with Satish at Meta, and thought his comments were interesting. When asked “Is PM dead? he responded:
I’m coming to the opposite conclusion. I think PMs are going to thrive in the next decade. That’s because we all go into product management because we want to solve great customer problems… but the soul is sucked out of us because we do a lot of work that nobody else wants to do. If AI enables automating that stuff, that sucks the soul out of product PMs, that’s the thing that is happening. The second part is that people are getting super powers. You can design faster, write code faster… PMs always have a lot of ideas so what’s going to happen is that each PM will have a lot more ideas executed on faster.”
Time will tell, but I think AI will enable smaller teams, which means less effort getting alignment. I also think it will blur the distinction between what are currently discrete roles. The function — solving customer problems worth solving — remains eternal.