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.
Product Management evolved from a business function to a delivery role, then a strategic one with the rise of unicorns. However, it later devolved into a rigid "cult of best practice," where adherence to specific frameworks (like no-date roadmaps) became more important than the actual work itself.
A study of product leadership hiring managers revealed a startling bias: 92% prioritize a candidate's community presence (e.g., LinkedIn posts) over formal product management certifications (favored by only 54%). This incentivizes personal branding over accredited skill development and demonstrated experience.
Move beyond basic AI prototyping by exporting your design system into a machine-readable format like JSON. By feeding this into an AI agent, you can generate high-fidelity, on-brand components and code that engineers can use directly, dramatically accelerating the path from idea to implementation.
Ditch standard FANG interview questions. Instead, ask candidates to describe a messy but valuable project they shipped. The best candidates will tell an authentic, automatic story with personal anecdotes. Their fluency and detail reveal true experience, whereas hesitation or generic answers expose a lack of depth.
The solution to product management's current issues isn't another framework. It's a "mental flywheel": start with a mindset of pragmatism and curiosity, which fuels creative action. This cycle is sustained by resilience and emotional detachment to handle inevitable setbacks and criticism.
The product management role exists on a spectrum between building and bureaucracy. The profession has now skewed heavily toward the bureaucratic end, focusing more on process, frameworks, and coordination than on the creative act of building valuable products, losing its original "magic."