Product Management in 2030

I was a product manager officially for about 6 years.  Unofficially I was a product manager for another 10.  Today I still am, in a you-can-take-the-boy-out-of-Iowa sort of way.  I use PM mental models  to guide my thinking and drive what sorts of things I work on, mostly because I don’t think I have any other way of doing it. 

You might wonder what a product manager does - some days I’d get pretty confused about it myself. And if you ask any developer they'll probably reply "I have no idea".  (Developers are eerily consistent with this reply, except for the magnitude of the exasperation in their voice as they answer.)  So ok, what do product managers do, anyway?

Many books have been written about product management, and opinions on the topic are many, but in my time being one, I've been able to approximate something close to the truth: the real answer is that a PM takes insight from the market, and aligns internal teams with it. 

So there are two tasks implied here.  One, you research the market by any means necessary in order to compile notes, MRDs, sequence diagrams, user interface mockups, and presentations so that you can make a product plan you think will get the point across.  And two, you convince internal people that it's right.  That means convincing software development teams that the product plan is rational, executives that it'll add to the revenue line (or subtract from the expense line), sales teams that it's the answer to their prayers, marketing teams that it serves the company's narrative, and support teams that it won't make their lives a living hell.

But all this is so 2020s.  Soon, AI will completely upend software development as a career and with it, product management.  I'm not claiming that this is definitely where things are headed, but I will say there's a strong, strong chance.

As a product manager, I took it as my role to be bilingual. On one hand, I had to be fluent in the language of my market - things like retail logistics, or SMB data integration, or accounting firms - and I should know how to gather data and deliver important insights back to the business.  On the other, I thought it would be good to learn programming, even though I would never be an actual engineer on a development team.  It was important to me in the same way that a restaurant manager should know how a kitchen works, and how to cook food without needing to be a professional chef. 

The thing that struck me right away about programming when I started learning more than a decade ago was the drudgery.  All I knew was that I wanted to build something cool, but I couldn't until I learned proper syntax for a recursive function, or calling this or that database, or (shock, horror) building a front-end using javascript and its many libraries.   

Now, Gen AI is lowering the bar to use code to build things.  Instead of asking their technical resource in plain English to build something just right, product managers will be expected to build functioning proofs-of-concept someday, perhaps soon.  Likewise every developer I talk to uses GitHub Copilot or its equivalent, and as Copilot improves, they can expect to write less code and more prompts, like asking their technical resource in plain English to build something just right.   

For product teams, the gap between Developer and Product Manager will get narrow…very narrow.  Your developers will drift closer and closer to product management, and your product managers will drift closer to being developers.

Someday, we'll all be product managers. As AI advances, the gap between software engineers and product managers is going to gradually close to a point where the two may become indistinguishable.  We'll live in a world where you use clever prompting to build entire applications and user interfaces without writing a single line of code.  No one will need to scrutinize your code, and only if you have scaling concerns would you need to worry about efficiency. 

In some ways, all this is really positive.  It frees developers from spending so much brain power on drudgery, and it widens the pool of people that could create tomorrow's apps.  But at the same time, it's worrying when you have big structural shifts in employment that require retooling and retraining.  Higher order creative thinking has always won historically, so perhaps I'll let myself feel a little bit of satisfaction knowing that product management skills will still stay relevant - at least for now.