A lot has been written about the death of product management. Let me be clear: the core of what we do will continue, while the tactical elements transform. This shift will empower those who've been focused on the craft rather than making them obsolete.
Product management connects today's activities to the future your customers want to inhabit. This means cultivating a product vision through customer conversations, competitive analysis, industry observation, and deep understanding of how customers use your product. It means connecting that vision to long and short term projects to make that vision a reality. It means assessing the impact of that work to inform future projects. And around it goes.
PMs also inevitably create mountains of documents. Clarity and alignment require documentation – product requirements, meeting agendas, incident post-mortems, email updates, presentations, and more. At its worst, this documentation burden overwhelms the more important but less urgent work of future-building.
Enter AI tools that make document creation almost trivial. While volume is now easy, the bar for quality is higher than ever. Seed AI with limited thinking, and you'll get boilerplate back. But when you've done the strategic work to understand what needs to be conveyed and why, these tools help surface overlooked elements and communicate with precision. Document format and length no longer signal competence – substance matters more than ever.
Quality and deep thinking have always been crucial, but in the past, one could get lost in (or buried under) day-to-day document generation. The core mission remains unchanged: helping teams understand what they need to do and why. That work isn't going away. Instead, AI amplifies our impact, enabling richer analysis, rapid prototyping, and compelling visuals to strengthen our case.
One final warning: don't lose the plot and use your new powers for evil. The ease of document creation isn't an invitation to bury your teams in paperwork while you elevate your focus. Being effective means figuring out what you need to say, who needs to hear it, and the most effective way to communicate it. As Blaise Pascal noted and roughly translated, "If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter."
It's a new world – scary, yes, but exciting. The "death" of product management might be the birth of something better.
