Okay, hear me out... Two thoughts: 1) The product manager role as we know it is cooked. And 2) that's not (necessarily) a bad thing. Let me explain.
A decade ago (or just, 12 months ago), everyone agreed on what product development was: PMs decided what to build, designers made it pretty, and engineers coded it up. Clear lines, no overlap. Now, enter your favorite AI coding agents. The game has changed:
- 12 months ago, you didn't want to waste precious engineering resources > You made sure that what you were building was carefully thought out, so PMs wrote PRDs to avoid this.
- 12 months ago, you knew that the smallest slip in timelines and deliverables could compound to launch dates being pushed by months, so PMs ran standups and kept close track with progress in linear
This shift is upending product teams. The old PM? The one who spends their time writing endless PRDs and running standups? Yup, that's dying. AI can handle most of that already.
So who's the new PM? They're builders. A builder who can combine product judgment, design intuition, and zero hesitation to create prototypes. Long live that PM.
Marc Andreessen described the Mexican standoff between PMs, designers, and coders in a podcast with Lenny Rachitsky. Everyone thinks AI lets them do the other's jobs. But that's a feature, not a bug:
"There's a Mexican standoff happening between product manager, designer, and coder. Every coder now believes they can also be a product manager and a designer, because they have AI. Every product manager thinks they can be a coder and a designer. And every designer knows they can be a product manager and a coder"
Who wouldn't want to give cracked engineers the agency to have opinions on product and bring them to life? Who wouldn't want a designer with superior taste and attention to detail to implement the tweaks in the frontend? And who wouldn't want a PM to build prototypes that don't just work on paper in your PRD, but actually solves problems in the hands of real users?
The PM who spends +50% of their time writing tickets, PRDs and running standups. The PM who "manages" engineers by acting as a relay between leadership and the team. The PM whose value is process, not product.
Most PM tasks today (status updates, PRD writing, stakeholder alignment emails, research summarization) are exactly the kind of work AI eats for breakfast. If 60% of your day is tasks AI can already do, you have about 18 months before the remaining 40% follows.
The PM who thinks like a founder. The PM who prototypes before they spec. The PM who has strong opinions about where the product is going and the technical depth to back them up.
Lovable just posted their first PM job listing, and it reads more like a founding engineer than a PM: bias to ship, building with urgency, technically deep, excellent product taste.
Ben Horowitz coined the definition of the PM as CEO of the product. Except now, "CEO of the product" means you actually get your hands dirty building it.
AI flips the workflow. Old way: Write spec, validate later. New way: Prototype with AI, test with users, iterate fast. PMs who just run meetings are obsolete; those who build demos and test out features before building? Essential.
When Lovable - one of the fastest growing startups ever - hires PMs, they don't look for good project managers. They want PMs who codes prototypes and ship with urgency, not perfection.
Not the function - the title.
Products That Count's research shows over half of CPOs already oversee product, engineering, and design. That number hits +90% within five years.
At Hebbia, we have a singular product development leader who runs product, design, and engineering as one org.
The CRO analogy is instructive. How many startups have a Chief Sales Officer and a Chief Customer Success Officer separately reporting to the CEO? The roles fused because the separation stopped making sense. The same thing is happening to product, design and engineering.
Stop aspiring to become a CPO. Start becoming a product builder. That means developing skills across product, design, engineering, and analytics. It means being fluent enough in code that you can build working prototypes without engineering.
If you're not aggressively hitting Claude Code limits, you're not doing this enough.
Oh, you should probably buy a Mac Mini if you haven't done so already.
The PM is dead. Long live the PM.