Product Management Isn’t Going Away. It’s Going to Get More Interesting.

I keep hearing conversations about which roles AI will replace. When it comes to product management, I actually think the opposite could happen.

I think the role is about to get a lot more interesting.

For years, a big part of product management has been translating what needs to be built into requirements, user stories and acceptance criteria that a development team can execute against.

What happens when AI can do more of the building?

Maybe instead of writing user stories for developers, we start writing prompts for AI. Maybe the distance between an idea and something you can actually put in front of a customer gets dramatically shorter.

But that doesn’t eliminate the need for product management. It changes where we spend our time.

Someone still has to decide what is worth building.

Someone has to understand the customer problem, challenge whether the idea actually solves it and know what success should look like.

Someone has to look at what AI created and say, “Nope. That’s not it.”

And someone still has to build relationships with customers, stakeholders and the people actually using what we create.

AI can help us research faster, prototype faster and build faster. It can absolutely take work off our plates. I’m already seeing that firsthand.

That’s the part of product management I think becomes even more important.

The best product managers have never just been people who write really good user stories. They’re curious. They ask good questions. They understand the business. They know their customers. They can take a messy idea and figure out whether there’s actually something there.

AI gives those people a pretty incredible new tool.

At least where the technology is today, I don’t see AI replacing product management.

I see it giving us the opportunity to spend less time documenting what to build and a lot more time figuring out what we should build and why.

And personally, I think that version of product management sounds pretty cool.