AI & The Impending Doom of Product Management

Time is Running Out for Product Management

👋 Hi Technocrats!

Product Management has been dying for the last 10 years and today we discuss how AI will be the smoking gun that finishes the job.

Cheers and let’s dive in! 🦈

Bobby

It’s a debate happening in a lot of circles these days: will AI kill Product Management?

And you’ve got champions on either side:

• Some people think AI will empower PMs to do great things

• Others think AI will soon be able to do everything a PM could

I have a different take on it.

I believe Product Managers have already been killing Product Management for 20 years and AI is simply the smoking gun they’ll use to finish the job.

The Original Goal of Product Management

When Product Management really took off after the early 2000s its goal was to build Product the right way.

No more building whatever the engineers wanted or going dark to work in crazy multi-year timelines. Things were going to be customer-focused & hyper-iterative.

Oh, and also, Product was going to be the buffer between Engineering & the Business.

No more engineering-speak in Board rooms and ELT calls. Product was going to bring its understanding of both sides of the house and be the bridge in between.

In fact, Product was going to bring rational thought to all R&D investments. It would decide on where, how, when, why to spend the money.

There would be business cases! OMG.

Actually, there’s a common saying that “Product Managers are the CEOs of the Product.”

In fact, back around the year 2000 Product Management had a TON of potential to change how businesses operated.

Product was going to offer almost profound levels of transformation & everyone was going to benefit.

It was supposed to be a brand new discipline that every company needed, which was pretty awesome.

Where Did Product Management Go Wrong

Any new discipline is difficult to get right & Product Management is no different.

You have to:

• Design the discipline itself

• Understand the new discipline in a way where you can teach it

• Explain it to other people

• Get it to stick in an organization

• Show that it’s succeeding every step of the way

• Be it’s champion

• Train the next generation of PMs

• And so forth…

Product people created a new concept and then tried to get it to stick in the average B2B SaaS company.

They should be applauded for this.

However, they should be criticized for what came next.

Square Pegs, Round Holes

While Engineering was busy kicking ass and taking names, Product Management was busy lurching around trying to figure itself out.

People streamed into Product from all sorts of backgrounds who never had any business being in the department in the first place and this hurt the adoption of PM quite severely.

In Engineering at least you had to have some kind of training in software development.

But Product Management became a catch-all department for people who didn’t know what they wanted to do.

People came in from Customer Support, HR, Marketing and all sorts of other areas. And while some of these folks were great, others never actually “got” what Product was.

This problem of “square pegs in round holes” was at least partially the reason why PM has failed.

Indecision About What Product Is

Equally as problematic as the wrong people being in Product is that to this day most people who are in Product or run Product can’t decide on WHAT PRODUCT IS!

This is staggering, actually.

We’re 25 years plus into this thing and we can’t decide what our discipline actually is?

It’s pretty ridiculous.

Engineering is definitely not sitting around debating what engineering does.

But even in just ONE fairly large company you will see all sorts of debates between Product people in terms of what their proper roles & responsibilities should be.

And that’s just ONE company so imagine this issue at a global scale.

To this day Product Management is a slippery slope of definitions that no one can really agree upon.

Smart Dummies

In the midst of trying to be an awesome “CEO of the Product” product leaders have generally failed to get the business side on board with the place of product in the company.

Do you know how many companies still treat product managers as project managers?

That means the entire concept of Product has failed at these businesses.

And PMs just go right along with it.

Sure, they’ll complain about their situation, but they won’t change it.

Let me give you an example: if a good account exec is forced into doing lead generation for more than a month, he or she will quit and go to another company that knows what it’s doing on Sales.

But if a PM who would normally be great at true Product Management is asked to manage the project plan in great detail for 5 straight years (I mean shuffling resources around, etc) they’ll just accept it.

So Product people want to be great, but end up hurting themselves a lot of the time by not standing up for what Product really should be doing.

Current State of Product (In Most Companies)

Let’s be honest about the state of Product in most companies — it’s not great.

Not a Business Partner

Product Management isn’t a true partner to the Business like the early PM creators and visionaries thought it should be.

Product has been unable to dig itself out of being a marginalized afterthought, to having a true seat at the table.

Sure there are companies where the VP Product sits in the ELT and makes Board presentations, but how much influence do they really have?

A lot of times they are no more influential than HR for example, which is essentially a supporting function and does not drive the business.

Not Being Practiced

Real Product Management is not even being practiced in many cases. This is obvious in so many organizations that keep producing low-quality products.

Product Managers are being relegated to project management as I noted, and aren’t even given an opportunity in certain cases of talking directly with customers.

Roadmaps are driven by Sales needs only, as well as what the Business THINKS it needs based on instinct & past momentum instead of using data gathered via Product.

Not Innovating

Product Management in the early 2000’s was supposed to lead to breakthrough product innovations. A sort of creative renaissance for companies who were finally going to do Product right.

For the most part though, innovation isn’t really happening.

Product is too busy dealing with huge backlogs and a thousand other administrative tasks instead of being creative.

In fact, businesses LOVE loading Product up with work no one else can or will do. And most of the time this work doesn’t move the needle.

Not Outcomes Focused

Product Management is all about process in most companies.

I don’t know what drives such a big focus on process for PMs — they are obsessed with it.

And what goes by the wayside? Outcomes.

It’s easily a 10 to 1 ratio between PM teams talking about process vs. outcomes.

Product Management has seriously lost its way here. In fact, a lot of PMs can’t even list out the outcomes they are supposed to be driving.

It’s almost like they are on outcomes “auto-pilot” just arguing about the process / steps without knowing what value they are creating for the company.

Not Understanding Customers

Product was supposed to understand customers in a way that Engineering and other stakeholders never could.

And there are some great PMs who totally get the needs, wants and desires of the customer.

However, PMs are generally not given the time to really, deeply understand the customer.

As a result of this, very stale products are made. Products that don’t fit the changing needs of the customers and users.

Of course, Product does gather a lot of user feedback at times. They just don’t have the time to operationalize it in the right way to keep the product changing and evolving.

AI & Product Managements Demise

In the next 3 to 5 years AI will do what Product could never pull off.

AI will enable Engineering to connect deeply with the business, customers and market, and Product Management in its current form will no longer be needed.

AI will handle the things Product should have been doing. And AI will handle the less essential things Product is forced to do now.

AI will Handle the Strategic Stuff

Let’s look at the strategic areas PM is supposed to ACTUALLY be working on & how AI will take over.

Understanding the Customers & Market AI will synthesize massive amounts of customer feedback, competitor data, and market trends in real time—delivering insights that would take human teams months to uncover. Instead of running slow, manual research, PMs will get AI-driven segmentation, churn prediction, and evolving customer personas at their fingertips.

Figuring Out What to Build AI will analyze customer behavior, adoption patterns, and engagement data to predict demand for new features before customers even ask for them. It will recommend the next best product decisions with data-driven confidence, eliminating gut-feel prioritization.

Developing a Winning Product Strategy AI-driven simulations and scenario modeling will stress-test different strategic paths, showing PMs which bets are likely to win. AI will optimize product roadmaps based on real-time business constraints, market conditions, and competitive pressures—meaning companies will always be working on the highest-impact opportunities. ⠀ Determining Ways to Monetize AI will auto-generate dynamic pricing models, A/B test packaging strategies across different customer segments, and recommend the best ways to drive new revenue growth. It will personalize pricing and promotions in real-time based on customer behavior and willingness to pay. ⠀ Designing the Right Outcomes to Move the Needle AI will generate and track metrics & OKRs that are automatically aligned with business goals, adjusting in real-time as new data flows in. Instead of PMs manually defining goals and measuring impact, AI will ensure every initiative is optimized for maximum ROI.

Building High-ROI Business Cases AI will generate instant, data-backed business cases by analyzing past initiatives, market conditions, and financial projections. Instead of PMs spending weeks pulling together spreadsheets, AI will automatically predict costs, revenue impact, and expected ROI—allowing for faster decision-making.

Defending Against Competitors AI will constantly monitor competitors, analyze market share shifts, and detect early warning signs of disruption. It will suggest preemptive countermeasures, acquisition targets, and feature gaps—helping the business stay ahead instead of reacting too late.

AI Will Handle the Boring PM Stuff Too

Let’s look at all the stuff that gets dumped on Product Management today.

Writing Endless Stories AI will auto-generate detailed user stories, acceptance criteria, and technical specs based on conversations, product strategy, and business goals.

Prioritizing the Backlog AI will autonomously rank feature requests and bug fixes based on business impact, customer feedback, and engineering effort. It will even adjust priorities dynamically as new data comes in.

Building Roadmaps AI will generate real-time, adaptive roadmaps that adjust based on engineering velocity, shifting business goals, and emerging market trends—removing the need for tedious roadmap updates.

Parsing Customer Feedback AI will instantly analyze customer surveys, support tickets, sales call transcripts, and user reviews—identifying the most impactful pain points and feature requests.

Building Decks AI will auto-generate impact reports, quarterly updates, and board presentations—complete with key insights, data visualizations, and next-step recommendations.

A/B Testing AI will run and analyze experiments at scale, surfacing the best-performing variations and automatically suggesting optimizations.

Writing Release Notes & Internal Updates AI will auto-generate release notes, product updates, and changelogs in a way that’s tailored for different audiences (customers, sales teams, execs). No more manual copy-pasting.

Coordinating Across Teams AI will act as a virtual chief of staff, ensuring alignment between engineering, sales, marketing, and customer success. It will schedule meetings, track dependencies, and risk.

Closing Thoughts

It’s clear the end is near for legacy Product Management.

It might take 5 years but the process has begun.

A new Product Management discipline might emerge that uses AI. But I think in 5 years time 1 person in Product will do the job that 10 people do today.

Product Management has been a nice but failed experiment to do Product the right way in companies.

Everyone tried, very, very hard.

But through a combination of shooting ourselves in the foot and the rest of the business world never quite understanding what Product management was all about, we have brought the discipline to almost the end of its lifecycle (to use a Product term).

And AI will soon put it out of its misery (at least in its current form).