I've been a product manager for fifteen years. In the last twelve months I've been asked some version of is the role even going to exist in five years? more times than I can count. Sometimes by junior PMs nervously eyeing the job market. Sometimes by founders trying to work out who to hire. Sometimes by my own friends, in the slightly anxious tone people reserve for asking after a struggling business.
It's a fair question. The tools have changed more in the last year than in the previous ten. The skills people are being asked to build look different. The teams around us are reshaping in real time. There's a version of this moment where you'd reasonably wonder if the job is being deprecated.
I don't think it is. But I do think the version of the job that grew up in the last decade — the one a lot of us settled into — is.
This is a piece about what's actually changing, what isn't, and why I think the answer matters for anyone trying to figure out where to point their career right now.
What product management quietly became
Let me start with an uncomfortable observation about my own profession.
At some point in the last decade, a lot of PMs stopped doing product management and started doing something else. The job collapsed, in many places, into a kind of operational glue role. Wrangling teams. Running rituals. Writing the Jira tickets nobody else wanted to write. Chasing engineering for estimates. Forwarding stakeholder feedback. Translating between sales and design and leadership. Being the person who, when something went wrong, was nominally responsible without ever quite being empowered to fix it.
Plenty of good people did that work and did it well. But it isn't the job. It's the scaffolding around the job. And in a lot of companies, the scaffolding had quietly eaten the thing it was supposed to support.
The real job — the bit that justifies a PM existing at all — is to maximise value for the customer and for the business. To work out what to build, why, for whom, and at what cost. To carry a clear point of view about the product's direction and to be honest enough to change that view when the evidence demands it. To make hard prioritisation calls and own them.
That work is hard. It's intellectually demanding. It requires you to hold customer reality, commercial reality, and technical reality in your head at the same time and find the path that honours all three. It's also, frankly, exposed — because when you make the call, you own the outcome.
It's much easier to be busy than to be that.
For a long stretch of the SaaS boom, the market tolerated PMs who were primarily busy. There were enough tailwinds, enough engineers, enough budget, that a competent operator could ride along. That tolerance is evaporating.
What's actually changing
When people ask me what's changing about the role, I want to say two things that sound contradictory and aren't.
The first is that the core of product management has not changed at all. The fundamentals — customer empathy, clear positioning, sound prioritisation, sustainable economics, the discipline of knowing what not to build — are exactly the same as they were ten years ago. If anything, they matter more, because the cost of building the wrong thing has come down so far that you can ship a lot of wrong things very quickly. The job of pointing the energy at the right thing has never had higher leverage.
The second is that the texture of the work is changing fast. There are new skills the job now demands, and they aren't optional.
Building is one of them. The classic trio of PM, designer, engineer is becoming a duo in more and more teams. PMs who can prototype, who can stand up a working version of an idea, who can move from spec to demo without a sprint, are accelerating. PMs who can't are slower. That's not a moral judgement, it's a description of what I'm watching happen across the New Zealand product community right now. The bar for what a PM can do themselves has risen sharply.
AI fluency is another. Not "I use ChatGPT sometimes." Real fluency. Knowing what these tools can do, knowing where they break, knowing how to design products on top of them, knowing how to operate them inside your own workflow until they're a natural extension of how you think. That's not a nice-to-have skill in 2026. It's the new floor.
The combination — I can build, and I can operate AI — is the thing that's pulling some PMs ahead of their peers. It doesn't replace the fundamentals. It compounds with them.
Why this is good news, mostly
The bit I find genuinely exciting about this moment is that it's making the job better.
The operational glue work — the bit that quietly ate the role over the last decade — is exactly the work AI is best at. Summarising stakeholder conversations. Drafting tickets. Compiling release notes. Pulling together the weekly update. Synthesising user research notes. These were never the parts of the job that justified a PM existing. They were the parts that crowded out the parts that did. And AI is, in many cases, demonstrably better at them than we ever were.
What that leaves, when you strip the glue away, is the actual thinking work. What is the customer struggling with that nothing else solves? What is the business model that makes this defensible? Where is the wedge into the market? What do we not build? Those questions don't get easier when the surrounding tasks get cheaper. They get more important, because the time you save on the glue you can now spend on them.
That's the job I signed up for fifteen years ago. It's also the job I most often see good PMs not getting to do, because they're drowning in Jira.
So if you're a product manager reading this and wondering if your job is going away: it isn't, but the version of it where you spent 60% of your week as a meeting-attender and ticket-mover probably is. I think that's a good thing. Even if it doesn't feel like it from inside the chaos.
The chaos is real, though
I don't want to be glib about the moment. The chaos is real. The pace is exhausting. The skills bar keeps rising. Everyone I know in product is operating with some background hum of am I behind, am I keeping up, what should I be learning next. Smiling exhaustion, as someone called it recently.
That's a real cost. And it lands unevenly — on people early in careers, on people with young families, on people who don't have the spare hours to spend nights and weekends teaching themselves whatever the new tool is. The transition isn't free, and it isn't equally costly for everyone.
But I think the framing matters. The chaos isn't the job changing into something unrecognisable. It's the job stripping back to its core, with new skills bolted on, faster than most of us are used to. It's still product management. It's just being asked to be sharper about what that means.
What I'd tell a younger me
If I was talking to a PM five years into the role today — the version of me from a few years back — I'd say a few things.
Stop optimising for being the person who knows what everyone is working on. That was never the value you brought. Worse, it disguised whether you were bringing any value at all.
Pick the thinking work back up. Spend more time with customers. Spend more time on the commercial model. Spend more time on positioning. The parts of the job that felt like luxuries in a busy week were never luxuries. They were the job.
Build the new muscles. Learn to prototype. Get genuinely fluent with the AI tools — not as a party trick, as a way of working. Treat that learning as part of your week, not a thing to fit in around the edges. Your employer should be making space for it; if they aren't, that's a signal.
And carry a point of view. The market is paying a premium right now for PMs who can hold the customer, the commercial, and the technical in their head and tell you clearly what should happen next. That's always been the premium. It just used to be possible to disguise its absence. It isn't anymore.
The bit I keep coming back to
The future of product management isn't AI versus PM. It isn't PM as a deprecated role. It's PMs who integrate AI into how they lead and build, and who have used the moment to clear out the operational glue and get back to the work that actually moves businesses.
The tools have changed. The fundamentals haven't. The leverage on the fundamentals is enormous if you stay close to your customers and brave enough to do the unjustifiable thing once in a while.
That, I think, is the most exciting part of this job I've ever had.