A company found its top engineers were "difficult." Before changing hiring criteria to favor this trait, they checked their worst-performing engineers and found they were also difficult. The trait was common to all engineers, not a signal of success, revealing a classic survivorship bias.

Product managers are increasingly acting as 'product builders' who code with AI. This isn't a strategic evolution of the role, but a rational response to misguided executive incentives that reward visible, technical output and threaten to eliminate PMs who don't demonstrate these skills.

The PM role is a high-leverage position intended to be a force multiplier for engineering and design. If a PM isn't making the team at least twice as good or twice as fast, their presence may be hindering progress, and the team would be better off operating without them.

The current PM career path is flawed, driven by framework obsession, advice from inexperienced creators, and a premature rush to leadership. This creates "strategy theatre" where leaders lack foundational experience, perpetuating a cycle of ineffectiveness and contributing to the craft's demise.

Organizations often appoint leaders from operations, law, or marketing to run product. These leaders lack fundamental product management experience, leading to weak strategy. Unlike in sales, where failure is quickly visible in revenue metrics, the damage from poor product leadership only surfaces years later, allowing ineffective leaders to remain in place.

If a product manager cannot conduct pricing research or understand financial models, their role is reduced to managing a Jira backlog, not driving product strategy. This is a symptom of poor hiring, indicating the company has hired a "backlog administrator," not a strategic leader.

Bending Spoons' product lead argues that the ideal PM background is either entrepreneurial, which teaches focus on impactful work, or deeply analytical, which fosters an understanding of root causes. These two paths provide the core skills needed for product leadership.

The traditional PM role, focused on coordinating and moving information, is being replaced by a demand for "builders" who exercise strong judgment. This fundamental shift, driven by AI, puts a significant portion of current PMs whose primary skill is communication and coordination at career risk.

The standard 'pod' ratio (1 PM per 6 engineers) infantilizes engineers and designers by removing their decision-making reps. Instead, Whatnot only hires PMs for specific, high-leverage needs, forcing other roles to build their own product muscle and raising the bar for adding PMs.