Sundial founder Julie Zhu intentionally avoids hiring product managers. This constraint forces engineers to take full ownership of the product definition and user value, preventing them from delegating critical product thinking and developing a stronger sense of customer empathy.

The PM role is intentionally undefined, meant to adapt to a team's needs—from strategy to quality control. However, these functions can often be filled by a strong engineering lead or designer, making dedicated PMs non-essential, and potentially harmful, on smaller teams.

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.

The 'CEO of the product' metaphor is misleading because product managers lack direct authority. A better analogy is 'the glue.' The PM's role is to connect different functions—engineering, sales, marketing—with strategy, data, and user problems to ensure the team works cohesively towards a shared goal.

PMs often feel pressure to keep engineers busy building new features. The real job is to drive deep understanding, even if it means perfecting three core features rather than adding a fourth. It's better to pause building than to create a bloated, mediocre product that does nothing well.

On the Codex team, the PM role is not seen as a traditional leadership position. Instead, it's a support function focused on doing whatever is necessary—bridging gaps, coordinating, and sometimes criticizing—to help the team succeed, rather than directing strategy from the top.

In AI development, trace analysis is a point of tension. Product Managers should become fluent enough to ask intelligent questions and participate in debugging. However, they should avoid owning the process or tooling, respecting it as engineering's domain to maintain a healthy division of labor.

The Product Owner role, as often implemented in Agile frameworks, is focused on delivery and backlog management. It typically lacks the core business ownership, customer interaction, and go-to-market responsibilities that define true product management.

Jack Dorsey reframed the Product Manager role as "Product Editor." The most valuable skill is not generating new feature ideas, but exercising judgment to cut through the noise, simplify complexity, and edit the product down to the essential few things that truly drive customer outcomes.