The traditional PM role will disappear as AI empowers a single "product builder" to handle the tasks of an entire 12-person team (PM, designers, engineers). This new role requires mastery of AI tools, judgment, and design taste to succeed, fundamentally changing product team structures.

To maintain a culture of 'doers', Applovin eliminated the product management function entirely. Engineers are expected to act as their own product managers, understanding the core business KPIs and ensuring their work directly drives revenue. This blurs traditional roles and accelerates value creation.

Hanover Park’s organizational design has no product managers or designers. Instead, it embeds engineers directly with fund accountants—the domain experts. This creates a tight feedback loop that allows them to build a more informed and practical product much faster by aligning development directly with user needs.

AI tools are blurring the lines between roles. Vercel SVP Aparna Sinha notes that product managers can now build and test working products, not just prototypes. This allows for hyper-efficient, small teams—sometimes just one person—to achieve the output of a full squad.

In an AI company, product discovery is tied to latent model capabilities. Legora's structure reflects this with a minimal product management layer. Instead, technical, research-led engineering teams directly translate model advancements into customer solutions.

The traditional PM function, which builds sequential, multi-month roadmaps based on customer feedback, is ill-suited for AI. With core capabilities evolving weekly, AI companies must embed research teams directly with customer-facing teams to stay agile, rendering the classic PM role ineffective.

Instead of hiring more PMs to manage faster engineering cycles, Anthropic focuses on hiring engineers with strong product taste who can ship end-to-end. This reduces overhead and blurs traditional roles, as most PMs and designers also have engineering backgrounds.

With AI making code generation cheap, product taste is the key differentiator. In top AI teams, PMs are increasingly technical, using tools like Claude Code to build and iterate, making their role nearly identical to an engineer's.

AI and low-code tools are collapsing the distance between idea and execution. The traditional PM role of managing engineering and design resources is becoming obsolete. The future belongs to product managers who can personally build, test, and iterate on products, transforming them into solo builders.