Why PMs are best positioned to thrive in an AI world
An optimistic case for the future of product management
👋 Hey, I’m Lenny, and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. For more: Best of Lenny’s Newsletter | Hire your next product leader | Podcast | Lennybot | Swag
I’ve recently published a couple of pieces that have created anxiety in the PM community (i.e. how AI is getting closer to replacing PMs, which parts of the job are most likely to be impacted), so I wanted to take this week to share an important message: I believe that product managers are the best-positioned role in tech to thrive in a world of AI.
In fact, many jobs will start to look more like product management.
Pop quiz: Which tech role is best at:
Identifying what to build
Distilling and communicating requirements
Prioritizing everyone’s ideas to the highest-ROI opportunities
Coordinating stakeholders, inputs, and conflicting needs
Giving feedback on designs to improve the product’s impact
Developing GTM strategy
Understanding business strategy
Crystallizing and getting buy-in for a vision
Influencing
Writing
I think the answer is obvious.
AI is good at doing what it’s told, but someone needs to be skilled at pointing it in the right direction, iterating until the work is great, shipping it, and driving adoption. That’s literally the job of a product manager.
Product management is evolving
Here’s how I’ve historically described the job of a product manager:
Your job as a PM is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of your team to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems.
Here’s my updated definition:
Your job as a PM is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of your team (both human and AI) to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems.
The most valued skill set will increasingly shift from building to knowing what to build, giving clear instructions for what to build, and having the taste to know if what you’ve created is great.
We aren’t in a place yet where someone can use AI tools to completely build great products, but every few months it feels like we’re taking a big leap closer.
Why PMs won’t be replaced with AI anytime soon
I’ve written about how many parts of the PM job will be impacted (or taken over) by AI over time, and what I haven’t made clear enough is that other tech roles will be impacted much more, and more quickly.
For better or worse, the PM job is an amalgamation of soft skills—communication, collaboration, coordination, influence, taste, vision, etc. People stuff! Glue stuff. Skills that AI will have the toughest time replacing.
Hard skills, like writing code, creating designs, analyzing data, extracting insights from research—this is work that AI is very good at.
A top-tier PM with the skills to fully harness AI’s capabilities is going to be the most valuable role in tech.
I’m not saying that engineers and designers and other roles will totally disappear; however, the engineers and designers with the strongest PM-type skills—identifying customer pain points, understanding business levers, clearly communicating, turning ambiguity into action—will do best.
Peter Thiel recently made this point—that AI is bad news for people with strong math skills and good for people with strong soft skills: