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

This could have been an email.

Product Management continuously rediscovers existential crisis.

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

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.

Why are we so obsessed with "moving fast"? Do we _actually_ have somewhere to be? 🤨

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

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.

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

My IT career began in the late 1980s before the tech boom kicked down the door. As a computer programmer (software engineer in modern days), we designed databases from scatch, design the flow in specifications, developed code from scatch, fully tested, did the project management on our own projects. With the introduction of the AI tool, we are going back to how it done in the early does of IT, expect this time we'll have a fancy tool to assist us. Then in the mid to late nineties soneone had the bright idea to have separate roles, BA, QA, PM, etc. Moral of the story, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I love doing it all because it fully understood the process in and out and the process was more streamlined

This is pretty cool to hear bc I worked in finance, am wrapping up Software Engineering school, owned a design company, did some management, and was thinking of getting into product Management. Years ago ppl used to raise an eyebrow at those with multiple facets.