The Product Leader Who Stopped Blaming Silicon Valley
If you’ve spent any time in product management over the last decade, you’ve probably felt it — that slow creep of the role becoming narrower, more reactive, more about managing a backlog than shaping a business. Most people in the field have a villain for that story: the tech-first founder, the engineering-obsessed CTO, Silicon Valley’s build-and-ship culture.
Grant Elliott had that villain, too. He even wrote about it — a piece called Did Silicon Valley Kill Product Management? Then he spent a year talking to CPOs, CEOs, and product leaders across the industry and arrived at an answer he wasn’t expecting: Silicon Valley didn’t kill product management. Product surrendered it. Gradually, and in many cases without much of a fight.
That reframe — from external blame to internal accountability — is what makes Grant’s perspective so compelling. He’s not here to commiserate. He’s here to make the case that the conditions to fix it have never been better, and that the window to act is open right now.
AI Didn’t Create the Problem — But It Can Help Fix It
Grant opens by doing something most guests don’t: he lowers the temperature on AI. He’s seen this movie before — internet, cloud, mobile — and the mistake is always the same: companies chase the technology instead of the problem. And right now, he’s watching CEOs set wildly ambitious efficiency targets based on a version of AI that doesn’t exist yet.
But the more interesting argument isn’t about AI hype. It’s about a structural imbalance that’s been building for twenty years between how fast companies can build and how well they understand what to build — and why AI might be the first thing capable of correcting it. Grant lays out exactly how that imbalance developed, why it’s made product the weaker function in most orgs, and what has to change for AI to actually fix it rather than make it worse.
He also has a sharp take on the whole “product-led vs. engineering-led” debate that I think will resonate with anyone who’s tired of that framing — I know I am. I jumped in with my own experience on this one, and we ended up in strong agreement about exactly what — and how long — it takes to achieve true product/engineering balance at a $100 million company.
Listen to the full episode for the frameworks, diagnostics, and case studies:
Grant’s direct challenge to anyone in a product role today who feels like they don’t have enough authority — and why he thinks it has to be as much bottom-up ownership as top-down support.
The electronic signature story — a real roadmap being driven by the wrong customers entirely, and what proper discovery would have caught before a single line of code was written.
The two traits Grant considers non-negotiable in every great product hire — and the AT&T story that shows exactly what one of them looks like in practice
What to look for in a job description that tells you immediately whether a company actually understands product — and the one reporting structure that’s a dealbreaker every time
Huge thanks to Grant for a conversation that’s as honest as it is practical. This one’s for anyone who’s ever felt the product role shrinking around them — and wants to know whether it has to.
About Grant
Grant Elliott, Co-Founder and CEO of SimplAI, has spent years obsessing over how to apply AI to strengthen how product organizations operate. He brings 30 years in product and technology leadership, including running a $500M global product portfolio as Product Director at AT&T, co-founding and leading Ostendio (a venture-backed SaaS company), and teaching entrepreneurship and business strategy at Pratt Institute.
Originally from Scotland, Grant is on what he calls a mission to make product management cool again.
Learn more about Grant and his background: linkedin.com/in/grantelliott.
