In five years, everyone will be a product manager

How this affects the traditional PM role, and what other people need to prepare for

Here’s a random thought for today: In five years, everyone will be a product manager. And I don’t mean this in the Chef Gusteau “Anyone can cook” sense, but that the typical software product manager role will get squeezed from lots of different sides as other people take on the bulk of the responsibilities now handled by PMs (note “the bulk”, not “all”). This includes domain experts, developers, and the intern who just discovered Jira.

From one side, domain experts are getting better tools to create good (or at least good enough) prototypes with AI coding agents. It seems logical to me that in a few years time, at least the technical aspect of “good enough” will become “great”, and that the magical pixies inside token parsing machines will be able to produce much more than just prototypes in the hands of a business expert. Tog’s Complexity Paradox suggests that once people get a more powerful tool they take on a more challenging task so those people will start trying to build entire products. Back to Chef Gusteau’s tagline, although it’s certainly true that great product managers can come from any background, the fact that anyone can build will mean that everyone will build, but those lacking PM skills and mindset will produce junk food. And that won’t be because the ingredients will be trash, since AI pixies will magic that away. The code will be flawless. It’ll just be a beautifully engineered dish that nobody ordered. Products will be tunnel-visioned, cooked up by overly confident chefs. Marty Cagan has a wonderful quote in Inspired warning about this: 



…people that have spent a long time building their mastery of one domain often fall into another common product management trap: they believe they can speak for the target customer, and that they are more like their target customer than they really are.

On the other side, teams who now build and execute product management vision are getting smaller, with fewer people being able to handle larger workloads. The Startup Factory by Joost Minnaar and colleagues talks about how Haier devolved a company with tens of thousands of employees into lots of relatively tiny networked mini-companies, with each striving for “zero-distance to customer”, and I think this is one potential direction where the industry will follow.

So people within the builder teams, developers, engineers, will need to take on more responsibilities to handle the customer relationships. This is just a progression from what’s been happening in the industry anyway over the last 20 years, with developers gradually taking more and more ownership of the shipped products in general (both from the operational perspective and in terms of participating in the direction where the product should go). But there’s another force to consider here.

With AI agents, smaller teams of 4-5 people can handle larger workloads, and there seems to already be a trend of reducing team sizes into pods, micro-teams and similar stuff. Two-pizza teams are being cut up into single-slice teams, and Coinbase recently got a lot of flak online for experimenting with one-person teams (don’t hold back the irony). To me, this just brings up the image of a sad lone engineer heroically finishing the last piece of pizza alone in a basement. When teams have 10-15 people, companies can justify assigning a dedicated product person to them. But with 4-5 people per team, I doubt this will be the case, and people inside the team will be expected to take on some PM responsibilities. Again, the logical risk there is that without the skills and knowledge required to handle product work, those responsibilities will be handled badly. Anyone can cook, sure, but Gusteau just never mentioned whether anyone would want to eat it.

I guess the consequence of all that is that we’re going to see an enormous amount of products launched with Air Sandwich Plans and spectacularly fail. Throughout that deluge of slop, people on all sides of the PM equation will need to learn how to do the basic product management tasks to be successful in their primary line of work. Customer empathy, thinking in bets, hypothesis testing and prioritization will become general literacy skills for the new age, kind of like spreadsheets are now.

Where does that leave traditional product manager roles? My best guess is high-level governance and oversight. I’d love to be able to say that once anyone can run a “product”, organizations need stronger central prioritization and guardrails to be successful, but AWS and Google seem to thrive despite a horrible amount of duplicated effort and products, so I’m not entirely sure that’s true. On the other hand, even if a brutal Darwinian survival competition might be financially acceptable for product development companies, I can easily see how customers will be disappointed by that. Nobody wants to see a Galápagos of half-finished apps, each one having independently evolved its own slightly different settings menu. And this is where the new PM frontier will probably go in the future.

Image credits: Or Hakim on Unsplash