In today's fast-paced tech landscape, especially in AI, there is no room for leaders who only manage people. Every manager, up to the CPO, must be a "builder" capable of diving into the details—whether adjusting copy or pushing pixels—to effectively guide their teams.
Related Insights
Webflow's CPO champions the "ICCPO" (Individual Contributor CPO) model. In the AI era, leaders must be hands-on practitioners who experiment with their own tools. This direct engagement is critical for understanding the new toolkit, discovering its limitations, and guiding their teams effectively from the trenches.
A product manager is ready for leadership not just by mastering their domain, but by demonstrating three key traits: understanding how all parts of the platform connect, being effective in customer-facing roles (sales, roadmap talks), and proactively building cross-team relationships.
Traditional "writing-first" cultures create communication gaps and translation errors. With modern AI tools, product managers can now build working prototypes in hours. This "show, don't tell" approach gets ideas validated faster, secures project leadership, and overcomes language and team barriers.
The core job of a Product Manager is not writing specs or talking to press; it's a leadership role. Success means getting a product to market that wins. This requires influencing engineering, marketing, and sales without any formal authority, making it the ultimate training ground for real leadership.
Simply instructing engineers to "build AI" is ineffective. Leaders must develop hands-on proficiency with no-code tools to understand AI's capabilities and limitations. This direct experience provides the necessary context to guide technical teams, make bolder decisions, and avoid being misled.
The traditional product management skillset is no longer sufficient for executive leadership. Aspiring CPOs must develop deep expertise in either the commercial aspects of the business (GTM, revenue) or the technical underpinnings of the product to provide differentiated value at the C-suite level.
The "ICCPO" (Individual Contributor Chief Product Officer) model requires leaders to use AI tools to self-serve answers directly from company data. This shifts the executive role from pure delegation to hands-on experimentation, modeling a culture of self-sufficiency and inspiring the team to adopt new tools.
AI tools reduce the communication overhead and lengthy handoffs that traditionally separated product and engineering. By streamlining the path from idea to code, AI makes the combined Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO) role more viable, enabling a single leader to manage both functions effectively.
While senior leaders are trained to delegate execution, AI is an exception. Direct, hands-on use is non-negotiable for leadership. It demystifies the technology, reveals its counterintuitive flaws, and builds the empathy required to understand team challenges. Leaders who remain hands-off will be unable to guide strategy effectively.
AI's rise means traditional product roles are merging. Instead of identifying as a PM or designer, focus on your core skills (e.g., visual aesthetics, systems thinking) and use AI to fill gaps. This 'builder' mindset, focused on creating end-to-end, is key for future relevance.
