Why AI needs new product managers
The future of digital product work with AI
Imagine this: you have a clear idea for a digital product you want to build. You know what the user’s problem is, you see the opportunity, but between decisions, dependencies and meetings, months go by before you see anything real. Meanwhile, the market moves faster than your roadmap. Do you really need that many steps to move forward?
In many product teams, the work itself is not that complex, what has become complex is the process. Every stage adds a brake: no time in calendars to validate, successive approvals, the need to rely on multiple data sources. All of that turns into slow delivery cycles, diluted responsibility, a lot of activity but little impact. Yet the paradigm shift is close.
If you work in digital product, you will have to leverage AI to evolve your profile into a product maker or a product builder. What do I mean by that? Someone who can take an idea from insight to launch, relying on agents and tools to automate a large part of validation. And what will happen to your role? Do not worry, the work that AI cannot do will be more important than ever.
The vision to formulate a clear stance on the product, the empathy to deeply understand user needs, the communication skills to align every stakeholder around that vision, the creativity to imagine solutions beyond the obvious and, maybe most important, the judgment to make high quality decisions in complex contexts. In all of this, you are better than any AI.
Everything else, exploratory analysis, early sketches, design tests, interview summaries, even functional prototypes, can be accelerated with AI. This is why product work will stop being a heavy sequence of tasks and deliverables and will become a fluid interaction between you and your tools. That is where a new space opens up, for those who not only use AI but reinvent themselves as product builders in this new world of work. And that opens up a world of possibilities.