Artificial product management
product management transformation still comes first 2026-04-21 #product
Like agile software development practitioners before them, product managers can’t help complaining about organisations that do it badly. These organisations either don’t know any better, or have invested too much political capital into a dead-end status quo. Meanwhile, as in any other field that becomes popular, more people do it badly than well.
Convenience beats quality
This resembles television professionals bemoaning the rise of low-quality video production on YouTube, when it first became popular. They got it right, when they said that people can tell the difference between high and low production quality. They just overestimated how much production quality matters.
Of course, it sometimes sucks that convenience beats quality, especially when you get paid to produce that quality. But we might at least welcome a speciality going mainstream: we’d rather have poor imitations than no imitations at all.
Programmer envy
The popular product management books make the case for proper ‘high-quality’ product management. However, I prefer to keep the Silly Valley Bubble at arm’s length, because their context differs so much from ours, in Europe, and in B2B products.
Product management in the US also seems to have a kind of programmer envy. Meanwhile, product managers (but not product owners) in Europe seem to have slightly higher status (and pay) than senior developers.
Product managers can code with AI. Product managers can write code the old-fashioned way too, and some of them might even get it to work. And skipping straight to coding prototypes certainly sounds more convenient than problem focus and design collaboration, but convenience and programmer envy quality trade-offs.
Product manager coding
In my recent job interviews, in late 2025, I didn’t encounter any demand for me to return to coding. In nineteen interviews, not a single one included asking me about vibe coding, as a product manager. More importantly, in my new product manager role, the team needs me to focus on product management, not coding.
Not only can I leave coding to the coders, I can also leave UX design to UX designers. Neither group needs or wants their product manager to deliver ‘working’ prototypes. Development teams need product strategy and prioritisation based on real product discovery, not vibes. And they don’t need vibe product management any more than they need vibe coding.
Artificial product management
As a product manager in a new role, you might find yourself slotting into an existing product management process, with established product operations. But you might also find yourself spending your first year on product management transformation, to establish product operations.
This transformation requires product management focus, and resisting both coding’s lure and the trap of convenience-over-quality. AI tools offer developers and product managers different opportunities. While developers seek productivity increases, product managers working on transformation still face an alignment problem.
Optimising product managers’ productivity comes later. Artificial product management – using AI tools – might address productivity opportunities in the future, but some product teams currently have bigger opportunities.
