Even though AI enables PMs to code, it's an inefficient use of their time. Since code creation is cheap and product strategy is the new bottleneck, PMs should focus entirely on product work, not engineering tasks.

Transformative product management isn't about writing specs or managing backlogs. It's about designing an automated system—a "product factory"—of AI agents that handles the entire development pipeline from customer signal to code draft. The PM's role becomes auditing and improving this system when it fails.

The biggest impact of AI on product teams is not individual productivity. The best PMs use AI to completely rework workflows for their entire squads, changing how the team collaborates, prototypes, and makes decisions, thereby increasing collective agency and speed.

AI's value for PMs is augmentation, not replacement. By automating tactical tasks that consume most of a PM's day (e.g., "six out of eight hours"), AI frees up critical capacity for higher-level strategic, creative, and innovative work—the core functions of a product leader.

Intuit's AI transformation didn't change the 'what' of a PM's job—identifying problems and shipping solutions. Instead, it changed the 'how.' Performance evaluations now emphasize skills like rapid prototyping, an experimentation mindset, and using AI tools to achieve core outcomes more effectively.

To discern a true AI-native product manager from a tourist, ask what they have built or automated. The ability to point to specific agents created or workflows automated demonstrates deep, practical expertise, which is far more valuable than just discussing AI concepts.

The rise of AI tools isn't replacing the PM role, but transforming it. PMs who embrace an "AI-enhanced" workflow for research, docs, and prototyping will gain a massive productivity advantage, ultimately displacing those who stick to traditional methods.

AI will transform operational tasks like coding and data analysis, but the core skills of a product leader remain uniquely human: articulating a vision, setting a strategy, and synthesizing data with intuition. The key new skill is learning how to effectively interoperate with AI systems.

While AI doesn't change the PM's core job of picking problems and aligning teams, it demands a new skill: delegation. PMs must unlearn the instinct to solve every problem themselves and instead learn to delegate tasks to AI, while owning the evaluation of the output. Idea generation is now cheap.