Is the PM role really changing?
I recently started contributing to our codebase, and it made me think about how PMs are supposed to spend their time in an AI-enabled product team.
Here's what people 'say' is happening everywhere:
- PMs not only prototype with vibe-coded tools, they also operate directly within the production codebase to build/ship MVPs or fix bugs.
- Engineers can now build/ship things much faster, so they don't wait for PM and designer. They go grab customer needs and ship solutions right away.
Here's what's 'actually' happening (a little bit of generalization included):
- PMs don't have that much time to build and ship things themselves. Since dev time has gotten so much shorter, PMs need to define product roadmaps and requirements at a much faster pace.
- Engineers don't actually have more time for customers. With growing pace of code production, they have more code to review, and they're spending more time on security and infra to make sure LLM-generated code doesn't break things.
So here's the real conflict. AI has made engineering much cheaper and given everyone the ability to quickly build whatever they want. But it also distracts people from their core focus. I've sometimes found myself spending too much time building small feature improvements or fixing bugs that don't actually move the needle on what matters most for a PM: defining what to build to deliver value for customers and move business metrics.
This feels like a new skill required from all 'product builders' regardless of role. When it's gotten much cheaper to build, how do you balance between building things right away vs. thinking from first principles to understand what you should actually be building?
To all the 'Cursor for PMs' out there: I'm personally watching to see how you'd help PMs with this skill 😎