Why PMs are best positioned to thrive in an AI worldAn optimistic case for the future of product management
👋 Hey, I’m Lenny, and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career. For more: Best of Lenny’s Newsletter | Hire your next product leader | Podcast | Lennybot | Swag Announcing two new speakers at the Lenny & Friends Summit
I’m excited to announce that Mike Krieger (CPO of Anthropic, co-founder of Instagram) and Kevin Weil (CPO of OpenAI, former Head of Product at Instagram and Twitter)—heads of product for the two most important AI companies in the world right now—will be joining the lineup of speakers at the Lenny & Friends Summit happening on October 24th in San Francisco. There’s still time to apply and join us. A couple more speakers will be announced soon. P.S. If you’ve already applied and haven’t heard back, give us a couple of weeks as we work through the overwhelming number of applications 🙏 Now on to today’s post… I’ve recently published a couple of pieces that have created anxiety in the PM community (i.e. how AI is getting closer to replacing PMs, which parts of the job are most likely to be impacted), so I wanted to take this week to share an important message: I believe that product managers are the best-positioned role in tech to thrive in a world of AI. In fact, many jobs will start to look more like product management.
Pop quiz: Which tech role is best at:
I think the answer is obvious. AI is good at doing what it’s told, but someone needs to be skilled at pointing it in the right direction, iterating until the work is great, shipping it, and driving adoption. That’s literally the job of a product manager. Product management is evolvingHere’s how I’ve historically described the job of a product manager:
Here’s my updated definition:
The most valued skill set will increasingly shift from building to knowing what to build, giving clear instructions for what to build, and having the taste to know if what you’ve created is great. We aren’t in a place yet where someone can use AI tools to completely build great products, but every few months it feels like we’re taking a big leap closer. Why PMs won’t be replaced with AI anytime soonI’ve written about how many parts of the PM job will be impacted (or taken over) by AI over time, and what I haven’t made clear enough is that other tech roles will be impacted much more, and more quickly. For better or worse, the PM job is an amalgamation of soft skills—communication, collaboration, coordination, influence, taste, vision, etc. People stuff! Glue stuff. Skills that AI will have the toughest time replacing. Hard skills, like writing code, creating designs, analyzing data, extracting insights from research—this is work that AI is very good at. A top-tier PM with the skills to fully harness AI’s capabilities is going to be the most valuable role in tech.
I’m not saying that engineers and designers and other roles will totally disappear; however, the engineers and designers with the strongest PM-type skills—identifying customer pain points, understanding business levers, clearly communicating, turning ambiguity into action—will do best. Peter Thiel recently made this point—that AI is bad news for people with strong math skills and good for people with strong soft skills:  What about product-minded engineers?...Subscribe to Lenny's Newsletter to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Lenny's Newsletter to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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Why PMs are best positioned to thrive in an AI world
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