The PM role isn’t dying. It’s speciating. I see PMs fracturing into four distinct tracks, driven by AI and automation. One of them faces extinction.
Here are the sub-species I see product managers evolving into.
1. The Systems PM ⚙️
- Who thrives: ex-DevOps engineers, or PMs in high-stakes domains (fintech, healthcare).
- Why: AI handles execution, but chaos erupts when 10 AI agents and decentralised teams collide.
- Toolkit: LangChain (orchestrate AI), Honeycomb (observability), Temporal (fault-tolerant workflows).
- Upskill: study systems and chaos engineering (Gremlin certs).
2. The Risk-Arbitrage PM 💸
- Who thrives: strategists who price risk like VCs.
- Why: AI spams 10× more garbage; someone must bet on the 10% that won’t implode.
- Toolkit: @RISK (simulations), Amplitude + Zapier (auto-kill features), ChatGPT (red teaming).
- Upskill: learn quant finance, predictive analytics, modelling and forecasting.
3. The Instigator PM 🔮
- Who thrives: creatives who blend cultural intuition with computational irreverence.
- Why: AI generates novelty, but only humans spot meaningful novelty.
- Toolkit: RunwayML (ideation), Spline (3D prototyping), SparkToro (niche trends).
- Upskill: master behavioural design (Penn’s Coursera course is a start).
4. The Human-Friction PM ⚠️ (endangered)
- Who clings on: “corporate glue” PMs in legacy orgs — banks, slow-moving enterprises.
- Why: AI automates the soft work (Spinach.io for meetings, Loom for updates). Productivity explosions mean smaller teams and fewer cats to herd.
- Escape: rebrand as a Systems PM or AI Ethicist. You have ~18 months.
What to do if I’m right
- Specialise ruthlessly. Full-stack PMs are dying. I say that as one of them.
- Curate better media consumption. Ignore OKR and roadmap PMs. Follow chaos engineers, quants, futurists, behavioural scientists.
- Treat skills as perishable. Seek to relearn everything every one to two years.
I’m leaning towards the Instigator personally.