Product Managers aren't safe either

jbv9901

This seems like a very doomer take. Hard to take this assessment seriously with absolutely no data or numbers to back this up. Especially since devs certainly don’t seem like they are going to be “cooked”.

__natty__

IMO if developers are “cooked” like you stated (would be nice to have more data tho) then certainly plenty of other white collar jobs are in even worse position. They are in a bit better position than many other corporate jobs when it comes to transfer of skills and learning new profession.

tetrisgm

The Product Manager profession has been made completely redundant in AI powered org. Everybody can look at numbers, plan features, and push for them. All the AI redundancies are focused on eliminating middle management. There is absolutely no place for PM. I say this as someone who has been in PM leadership and built product orgs several times over the last 20 years.

georgemcbay

IMO anyone who feels safe from what is going to happen (already happening, really) in the labor market over the next decade is ignorant or is heavily in denial. I'm not saying we're surely all doomed here, but there are going to be a lot of changes that none of us can imagine every aspect of, and they are going to happen at a surprising speed, and there are a vast number of cascading impacts that people aren't thinking much about. eg. if you're in the trades, yes you're safer than a knowledge worker for now, but if all the knowledge workers get wiped out you're both going to have vastly decreased demand for your work (far less individuals will have the disposable income to hire you, companies will have less need for facilities to house employees, so you'll also see a retrenchment on the corporate side) and you'll start getting a labor supply glut as the knowledge workers all desperately attempt to retrain for the 'safe' jobs. And this is just the short term problem, without getting into the robotics threat. If we don't get ahead of this problem politically (spoiler alert: we won't, at least in the US, it is unclear if we even have a functioning democracy), things are going to get very messy for virtually everyone who relies on labor income.

soontimes

Product managers is not just about making product features. It’s a job that requires lots of human interaction, and this part is notoriously complicated for engineers. Article states that a person coding the feature can build a product intuition, and that’s true, product is not sorcery, but from my experience most engineers are just not interested in that. That may change, of course, if engineers will be pressured by economic situation, but until that they’re happy when someone else is interacting with users and stakeholders.

monkeydust

PMs ultimately take bets. Some to many will fail and if they are great a few will pay off in an excessive way. I have yet to see anything in the AI field that make better bets than my best PMs (I manage 50 of them) but as soon as I do the whole calculus changes. I joke with them about it. They also joke back it could happen to me (which it absolutely could). We live in interesting times.

popkkksidhd

Is it really that grim? AI helps a lot and is great at certain well defined tasks, but the “AI team” at my small org launched a new product very fast and very buggy. Customers were pissed. They had to go back to reading the code and applying some thinking and care to get a working product out. Still faster don’t get me wrong but there’s still a lot of tradeoffs to be made that AI can’t really do alone. Like there’s no objective correct answer. Is this just domain dependent?

bobbiechen

>It's up to you to think that PM are better equipped when it comes to understanding why a feature make sense than a developer. Many developers don't want to think about these at all (and I say this as a former-developer-current-PM).

joshuaS98

They were never really needed to begin with

avelis

Execution of an idea is not the only function of a PM. There is product development, customer feedback, outreach, go to market, customer success. I don't see how AI is wholesale replacing customer outreach & go to market but I could be wrong.

mnd999

Instagram hadn’t killed professional photography though. This is a load of nonsense.

greatNespresso

Thank you for reading! I wasn't expecting much réaction to be honest. And you are 100%, this was thoughts wandering after a long late night discussion with friends who work for a CRM company. Not backed by data, not a prediction, just subjective take at 1am. And yes, thinking architecture, tradeoffs, scalability and safety isn't going anywhere. Spending all day writing code as proof of work is out.

itishappy

Of course PMs aren't safe, but the article makes a great point why they're currently more relevant than ever! AI can now push new features at speed, but somebody still needs to steer those features into a desirable product. Customers will ask AI for a faster horse. This is why AI companies aren't spinning out new companies left and right. They can obviously push huge volumes of code, but can they effectively manage the resulting products?

rvz

The "job" that will still continue to exist will be the one who has to defend a company from getting their data breached against swarms of AI agents at >20,000 TPS. Someone will have to be the technical bodyguard that needs to thwart an attempted breach as quick as possible without causing an outage and that is the difference between a $45,000 breach vs a $450M breach. Enough to bankrupt a startup. Using something like Cloudflare won't be enough this time.

dzink

Product Managers figure out what people want. Using AI they can easily transition to become founders. The decision Big Tech has to make when hiring one is: Would I want to compete against this person.

starik36

None of the articles, that purport to know who is safe and who isn't, should be taken at face value. We literally have no idea how anything is going to shake out, given how fast everything is changing.

high_5

... until the LLM-PM wades into some lethal trifecta via a customer or some other party.

designerarvid

So PMs aren’t safe because you need to…understand customer pain points? Buddy, that skill is what PMs that are any good at their job spent a lifetime perfecting. Rather, PMs aren’t safe as managers could just ask the agent to find the problem worth solving and then go solve it. But that takes us to a rather different world.

MiroslavPokorny

So what happens when everyone is building the "same" app because they ask the "same" question to AI, without actually using their understanding and creativity to be "different" ?

sdevonoes

The real question for executives is: engineer + AI or PM + AI? I certainly believe that decent engineers do already have a good degree of knowledge about product topics (it’s like a must nowadays). PM/POs don’t really know enough on the tech side, so they would be clueless even with claude.