Melissa Perri chimes in on how AI is changing the product role, and makes the case for measuring PMs by decisions changed and outcomes shipped, not by tickets written and docs generated:
If you are a PM, stop measuring your productivity by how many tickets you wrote, how many pages of documentation you spun up, or how fast you closed the loop on the last sprint. That work is going to keep getting easier.
Measure your productivity by how often you changed a decision that mattered, how often you saw around a corner, how often a senior leader walked out of a room thinking differently because of something you said. How often your shipped features translate into real customer outcomes is what matters.
Everything I read is saying the same thing right now: judgment, customer understanding, and the ability to change a senior leader’s mind in a room are the skills that AI can’t touch. I’m not disagreeing necessarily, but I do think that narrative is missing a big new skill that is needed. I wrote about this in What actually changed about being a PM:
I was talking to my wife the other day about what I’m doing, and she asked the obvious question: “Why are you automating your job away?” My answer: the people who automate their own jobs away are the ones who become more valuable, because the craft is now in orchestration — setting up the layers so the AI does the right thing.
I also continue to think about this quote from Org Design in the Age of AI and how the focus is shifting from “information movers” to builders:
The old PM spent most of their energy making ideas legible to other people. The new PM validates directly — prototyping, running data analyses, generating first-pass implementations. […] The managers who thrive will be the ones whose real contribution was always judgment, coaching, and navigating ambiguity — not routing information.