Product Management Is Dead, So What Are We Doing Instead? | Lenny & Friends Summit 2024

Claire Vo is the Chief Product Officer at LaunchDarkly and the creator of ChatPRD. She previously held leadership roles at Optimizely and Color. Claire is known for her forward-thinking approach to product management and her expertise in AI-powered product development. In this talk, she discusses:
• Why product management as we know it is dying
• How AI is transforming product development faster than we expect
• The rise of AI-powered "triple threats" who can handle product, design, and engineering
• What product leaders need to do to stay relevant in the AI era
• How to build and manage AI-powered product teams
Recorded live at Lenny and Friends Summit on October 24th in San Francisco
Slides: www.chatprd.ai...

[@tylerdurham9791]

As a developer wanting to transition into a PM role, I could easily see this trend happening and it's exciting! Our PM's where I work are comfortable with digging into databases, influencing design, and getting into the code and understanding at high level how it works.

[@10Narmihkiehs]

I believe PMs role needs to be discontinued and back to project manager. Product Designers need to be the go to with Eng Lead

[@nuthinking39]

@@10Narmihkiehs That really depends on who is the Product Designer. If it's someone who has business acumen and is in direct touch with users/customers, sure.

[@SM-cs3nt]

@@10NarmihkiehsNot necessarily. Why would you need design skills for this?

[@10Narmihkiehs]

@ PMs have been overrated. Most of the work for PMs has been down-leveled to project manager

[@SM-cs3nt]

@@10Narmihkiehs Depends on the company. There are lots of PMs in very powerful positions. They are a swiss army knife and work best in small agile teams to deliver features quickly

[@productcup]

Product Management continuously rediscovers existential crisis.

[@arslanbaha]

Which role does not?

[@willywig]

What she misses is if AI can automate the creation of the product then AI is the product and the need for the product itself is in question not just the product managers.

[@RonMashate]

Yup. This is the paradox. The the process of product management is abstracted away by the tools, then an agent that is both the tool set and an orchestration of the tool abstracts away the PM. At the end of the value loop is a user, so why not let the user interact directly with an agent which is a avatar for company xyz.

[@zoltannemeth8864]

Agree. Also, it’s interesting to note that there was a focus on “thinking about the product needed 18 months from now, 3 years from now…” vs the industry focus on “fail fast”, “bring value now”, MVP… in my experience many uses struggle to tell you what they will need 18 months from now or 3 years from now… I think the key is to be deeply embedded in the daily world that your users are in if you can. Understand their experience deeply, then see if there is an opportunity to fill a need or help them be more effective and efficient. AI can do a lot of cool stuff now. But I am not sure if having users tell it what they think they want directly via agents is going to have good outcomes outside of relatively trivial tools. Not saying that does not have value, it’s just that I am not sure I would trust my company in the hands of an average employee knowledge working telling an agent to update my custom business solution (market differentiator)… so many things could go very wrong…. Just my 2 cents.

[@10Narmihkiehs]

This could have been an email.

[@RajdeepBarman]

Ha!

[@RajdeepBarman]

Great talk though

[@trez6465]

Key Themes: The Accelerating Impact of AI: AI is driving unprecedented changes in product roles faster than anticipated. Tasks that previously took weeks now take minutes, thanks to AI tools like ChatGPT, no-code solutions, and automated workflows. Evolving Product Strategy: The traditional method of creating product strategies through extensive manual effort is outdated. AI tools now streamline this process, making it quicker and more efficient while delivering similar results. AI's Role in Day-to-Day Product Work: Tasks like drafting documents, gathering feedback, writing updates, prioritizing features, and generating slides can be automated, freeing up time for creativity and deeper work. Emphasis on reaching 75% quality faster, instead of aiming for 100% through manual processes. The New Product Team: The traditional triad of product, design, and engineering roles is breaking down. A shift towards "generalist-specialists" who can work across multiple domains, using AI to enhance their capabilities. Emergence of the "AI-Powered Triple Threat": Future teams will have individuals proficient in engineering, design, and product management, supported by AI tools and agents. These individuals will lead smaller, more agile teams capable of delivering faster results than traditional, siloed teams. Cultural Shift in Team Dynamics: "No lanes" culture: Team members with the right skills are encouraged to step into any role as needed, breaking down silos. Team structures will become more flexible, built around individual strengths and AI capabilities. Preparing for the Future: Product leaders must prepare for AI's impact by: Hiring and developing "AI-powered triple threats." Budgeting for AI tools and agents alongside headcount. Building teams tailored to specific challenges rather than rigidly adhering to traditional structures. AI's Implications for Product Leaders: Leadership roles are not immune to AI's disruptions. Skills like managing AI-powered teams, scaling AI capabilities, and embracing commercial and technical skills will be essential for future success. Conclusion: AI will collapse traditional talent stacks, combining multiple roles into fewer individuals empowered by AI. Product leaders must act now to embrace these changes, skill up, and envision the future. The key to success is leveraging AI tools, building adaptable teams, and finding innovative, multidisciplinary talent to thrive in this rapidly evolving landscape. Final Advice: Seek out AI-powered, versatile individuals, invest in their skills and tools, and adapt your strategies and culture to harness the power of AI for product development.

[@BalajiSundara]

90% of companies do not know what they want from Product Managers they hire. Sometimes they see PMs as UX designers. Sometimes as Project Managers. sometimes as R&D engineers, Sometimes are analysts and presentation experts. Its the industry that created this garbage role

[@hugekins]

I hate to say this but you are right. I've been a product manager within big tech, startups throughout career. However, if a product manager can't adapt to change, especially tech, then pivot.

[@SM-cs3nt]

The idea is that a PM can do all of the above: A good PM can draft a roadmap, have a product strategy and is comfortable diving into all of these topics. The premise is that small agile teams build the best products. For this you need a person who is A) Accountable and B) responsible for directing the full product development. They need to talk to legal, engineers, customers, sales, management and any and all stakeholders and then be able to draft a full scale solution that accomdates the needs of everyone best and generates revenue. You don’t need project Managers - if you focus on outcomes rather than Outputs

[@ceo.amai88]

as a founder, i see Product as the 'wild wild west'. it is a function set up after the essential functions ie sales, dev, ops. unlike other specializations, product specialization comes from... the product itself. essentially, you want the people that loves what you're building/selling, your #1 fans so to speak, to be your Product hires. so you can give this team some freedom. you can pull from your marketing team, sales, engineering etc to make your product team as they already know the brand and business. but yes you are correct in that, they are a "non essential" function so to speak, on some level

[@nikitachernenko3774]

Most of the product management contenting existing on the Web is of terrible quality. Most of Product Managers do not understand what their title even means. LLMs were trained on all of that data, and, therefore, produce very poor product decisions. Anybody who truly understands Product Management would see it. Product Management is more alive than ever.

[@MrPrebuttal]

Do you think product management will continue to grow in importance or diminish with AI automation. Additionally is now a good time to get into product management? Thanks

[@stereodark]

The job was never about writing up the results but learning customers needs and developing a strategy based on the context. Sure some of the time consuming stuff can be automated and sped up with genAI support, but we are not anywhere near full self driving mode.

[@nuthinking39]

As someone who wears many hats, I can't agree more with this prediction. Individual productivity was already improving before AI, but now that we start talking about 10-person unicorns, the idea of a one-man feature team suddenly becomes inevitable.

[@JuliaBerzoy]

*laughs in enterprise software*

[@amberagrawal385]

What does it mean. Can somebody elaborate please?

[@brabecjakub]

It means that PM job in enterprise software is wastly different than b2c for example. Not that PMs in enterprise don't have to prep PRDs... they do. But it is also a lot about politics, budget wars, influencing. Having a PM title job in enterprise is... confusing.

[@AjaySolleti]

I agree. In current enterprise systems this won’t work. Unless someone comes up with a true ai enterprise systems. This works for developers and dev mindset, but real business are done by people who aren’t so tech savvy (coz no biz wanna pay more)

[@saadkiani5428]

On the dot!!

[@maxkrupenko]

Well, it depends on the industry and company. For a startup, being a versatile ‘Swiss Army knife’ as a product+designer+developer is often more essential than in an enterprise setting.

[@tw.267]

Just because AI can code doesn't mean anyone can use it effectively. You need years of experience and training as a Programmer to distinguish quality code from poor code. The same goes for Product Designers. AI might create beautiful screens, but that doesn't capture the value Product Designers bring to the table. They spend years honing their skills to quickly identify what should be built, what users need, and how products should function. If we replace these experts with generalists using AI, we'd lose the expertise that ensures our products meet user needs and are coded with quality. Companies would lose their competitive edge significantly. It's like asking a junior programmer to code with AI, or a junior designer to design with AI....and... ship it. 😂

[@selinov]

@@tw.267 Unfortunately, I have encountered startups that are unwilling to acknowledge your truth. Because of their small budgets, they often put Product and Design under engineering. Engineers are frequently trained to be convergent thinkers, always delivering the single optimal solution rather than nuanced options with trade-offs. Optimal usually means the easiest to implement to meet a deadline, not the best as determined by a diverse team. I've found these products easy to identify through their flawed UX and mounting design/technical debt.

[@tw.267]

@selinov YES!! Exactly this. Companies can waste so much money chasing what is quickest to implement, only to discover it does not work well for users. It is so outrageously expensive to recode once you figure out that the product you built is not working for people.

[@saivishnu866]

@@tw.267"It's like asking a junior programmer to code with AI, or a junior designer to design with AI....and... ship it" - that's exactly the point. its already happening. gumroad customer support teams shipped features using Cursor.

[@ahmedsanni8538]

​@@saivishnu866 exactly. If they ship something shitty, customer feedback guides them back on the right path. Its that versus allowing the experts spending weeks to build and get to the same outcome.

[@sunny_side_up8]

I agree with you. But how I see is..now instead of 10 member , organisation would look to hire only 2-3 best resources. Since gen Ai can provide a strategy ,structure, design and code already, so no need of multi member teams. In a way , number of vacancies available would go down, competition would be cut throat and you have to be best of best in order to get into the role.

[@janetcarolan1101]

thought provokingggg! as someone who's fallen into being a pm and now finds themselves making wireframes with v0, hacking important business flow integrations with n8n/make and ai written code nodes and chat gpt nodes alongside managing developers reporting of feature uses and gathering requirements - i find this very exciting! since i was more intrigued than seemed necessary by the coding/technical/ai side of things its nice to feel empowered for wanting to know and do more than was initially required of me

[@AndranikThorson]

lionvaplus AI fixes this. Product Management Dead, What's Next?

[@spcoon]

Daria prompt engineered this talk.

[@abhiruproy919]

If you do all of those things using AI only - well, all the best , how well that product succeeds , also the biggest job of a PM is " bringing everyone together" , that's still not done by AI

[@sreeharshach2048]

One thing I’ve noticed from my experience is that product owners and managers often add a lot of unnecessary details instead of getting straight to the point. I found myself getting lost many times while watching this video. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but according to her, the future will involve a single role combining the responsibilities of a project manager, product owner, full-stack developer, and AI specialist.

[@albertvargasUX]

and designer as well

[@cadubrrj84]

Companies still cannot deal with the simplest concepts of products such as triads, empowering squads and understanding the real capabilities of people in the right teams. Perhaps the real problem is that technologies allow many wrong ideas to flow unchecked.

[@goldstonpreetham1449]

I hope Ai will have the money to buy new products because we don't

[@AIPapersDecodedPodcast]

AI is just saving time for everybody to be used to build better and beloved products

[@a.w.3333]

We are already seeing misalignment between job descriptions and actual expectations. It makes me wonder how hiring and salary negotiations would evolve if we were to adopt this approach.

[@naturemeditation3751]

Beyond her spiel the end goal is to make the vendor per se redundant that would be the AI impact so all these companies will disappear with AGL …the flow will be higher compute intelligence or super intelligence to user experience.. but till that happens folks like her and other businesses will sell “USP” to customers

[@ajohncant]

Product management is dead? I can get back to developing the product unimpeded!

[@chirantanr]

Would have been great to see the deck alongside Claire.

[@LennysPodcast]

Link in episode description 🙌

[@davemartin5882]

Really enjoyed this, embracing GenAI offers so much potential.

[@ahmedodufuwa9792]

love this ! Thanks Lenny

[@spkrause]

The title is hyperbolic and clickbait-y. Her actual talking points (Product Management is changing, not going away) don't align with it.

[@marksweeney5329]

MF Fire! Claire hits a lot of examples of how using the right tools as a full stack PM also includes design and dev work. Unblock yourself and others and you'll win.

[@LuisDanielSotoMaldonado]

PM is more difficult to automate than other roles, it deals with high complexity and new frontiers

[@vikmurty382]

Product Managers are the "Directrors" of business and product dev and community leadership. That is not dying. Perhaps the methodology or the point of PM in Software can be irrelevant?

[@kbystryakov]

Can ChatGPT generate 10-pages document (product strategy) ?

[@idahsons]

Very insightful

[@10Narmihkiehs]

was she recording the audience with her Spectacles?

[@onnosmail5512]

Hey ChatGPT summarize this video for me

[@ramanasketches]

pm is dead ux is dead ...software is dead 😢 ..what is live then ?

[@kangaroomax8198]

snake oil

[@tanyatango4197]

People who can sell themselves as "thought leaders" by spinning same old thing in new bottle

[@tanyatango4197]

People who can sell themselves as "thought leaders" by spinning same old thing in new bottle = people who can sell

[@BeRadHump]

It’s hard to focus on the content of this talk because of the poor audio quality - for live event recordings please isolate the presenter voices to remove the distracting mic feedback / echos / background noise

[@brabecjakub]

Use headphones buddy

[@krishsubramanian9703]

Normally, I love your podcasts. But this one felt like Claire was marketing her ChatPRD through fear psychosis. There was less substance and given her reputation, this talk of her was a lame duck. There’s lot more to Product Management!!

[@bazejkazmierczak4660]

Exactly that! Great talk. And yes, it's going to happen faster than most ppl think.

[@Lime1958]

Its quite understandable to automate repetitive labor intesive work. But this. Expecting for one personnel to be able to deliver a 10 man job. It sounds more oversight, more mistakes and more recalls. It all sounds like very expensive maistakes for these companies all because they wanna cheapen on labor.

[@myxsys]

There is a risk with this sort of advice. When you rely on technology too much, you start producing generic deliverables. You need time to refine ideas and using AI to speed up your process can make you miss opportunities.

[@DanielSalgadu]

* laughs in introspective engineer and idealist designer*

[@youngloenoe]

So this AI powered super worker cannot get sick or even take a day off?

[@oldro4chyboy]

Chat “PRD”

[@Mega11648]

AI is just like Lamborghini. It will take you to your destination faster, but it can't go without your direction.

[@tanyatango4197]

Okay so what is the point?? Use my super highlevel, generic PRD AI tool and think I dont need any PMs anymore?? Good luck with that. Barring ppl who build and ppl who sell, every other function is prone to death, reincarnation and death again. Clearly speaker is a person who loves selling, her title notwithstanding, thats what she does... rest is all hyperbole... just learn to be really useful in your job, whatever title it is, you will be good.

[@dhruvbhatia7]

This was such a terrible video. So product management is dead because AI can now do product strategy docs and write meeting notes? Similarly marketers will be dead because AI can write content? Coders will be dead because AI can code? Who made this person a CPO?

[@dezertson2011]

She’s proving how worthless everyone knew product management was all along.

[@bknauss]

Did you get past the title of the video?

[@skucherov]

what a stupid idea, what a garbage this product will be!!

[@johnbaz]

I'll pay forward the magic ingredient I've used for a decade. Start thinking of building products from the one-mind mentality of "Product Development". Stop thinking of the trinity: product | UX | eng.