Product Management Is Dead, So What Are We Doing Instead? | Lenny & Friends Summit 2024

good morning I'm very excited to be here and they thought what should we do bright and early at the product leaders conference let's just go ahead and nicks product management entirely let's get rid of it um we can all go enjoy a great San Francisco October morning so I'm here to tell you and I act I believe this to be true this is not a hot take for the sake of hot takes product management is dead it or it will be soon and so I'm here to talk about what we're all going to do instead

but first what an amazing conference okay everybody smile because you all never get this let's take a picture okay we got the picture we'll see if the smiles are still there at the end of the talk all right so uh you know I've been saying this a lot but AI is going to transform the role of product design and Engineering faster than we all expect and whenever I say this people go yeah yeah yeah Claire and I say no no no faster than that and so I want you all to think about the change the

rate of change in technology over the last 18 to 24 months things that candidly after two decades of being in a product role I never thought I would see a my lifetime has now become kind of boring to me I think the rate of chain is very fast and our job is to not be surprised and so when I tell my team about Building Product strategy I say I'm not interested in building a great product for today I'm interested in thinking about what our customers are going to need from us in three five and 10

years and building the product that's going to push towards that future that we believe in and I really believe the same goes for Building Product teams I want to imagine the product team of 18 months from now three years from now 5 years from now 10 years from now I want to think about how that team's really going to operate I want to play some bets on what I think is going to change and I want to build that team but before I go there I'm just going to tell a little story about baby Claire

CPO you know many many moons ago and I know you all have Maybe started new product leadership jobs and you've got asked this question so you know you're here you have some experience what what's our product strategy anybody even asked that question before yeah okay great one person great this is a great great conference um and I remember doing this exercise of what's our great product strategy and I went through this exercise where I said Okay first I'm going to talk to customers I'm going to talk to a bunch of them I'm going to take

a bunch of notes and then I'm going to talk to the team um I'm going talk to sales which is money mouth Cowboy which might also be sales we got CFO in the glasses in engineering who's too cool to even look at you we're going to talk to the team we're going to say what you know what do you think what what what have you seen and then I'm going to think really hard like I'm gonna take all that information I put in my brain I think so hard and I'm G to type and I'm

G to put it into this dock that says my amazing strategy of course it's going to be in Kota so I'm going to do this amazing strategy and then I'm going to take it back to the team but there they're now annoyed because they don't like what I came up with and I'm going to get more feedback from this team and then I'm going to think really hard again I'll use my brain everything I know about the market all my strategic books that I've ever read in my life I'm gonna you know think back to

play bigger and then I'm going to do my amazing strategy V1 and then I'm going to give it to the team and the team's going to give me 8,000 comments and then you know another drill a brain goes back into play and then I have my amazing strategy final final this one with a link to all the drafts at the top so this I I I I legitimately remember doing this it output this like 10-page document that I think was pretty good it took me weeks and weeks and weeks so many conference rooms when we

did that sort of thing and that was how I built a product strategy the last time I built a product strategy this is what it looked like I dropped off my kids at school I had done the customer calls and talking to the people I put ja chat GPT voice on my phone and I just prattled I just did this blah and I asked hey what's our product strategy after all my prattling and guess what I got the same damn 10 document 10 page paper on what our product strategy was I of course sat down

on my laptop made it a little better but I would say like for like it was pretty good and that is the difference in how product can operate I think it's a perfect metaphor for how product is changing so before you know it took weeks to write and revise and sharpen long product strategy now I'm hanging out in my minivan talking to chat GPT on my way to work you know before you would take these days to write feedback and requirements in a doc and da and now you're taking 15 minutes to scaffold out something

that's 80% good and then 45 minutes to sharpen and then ship it uh you would draw wire frames on paper I used to use paper like draw wireframes on paper or balsamic if you're being cute and then wait for design to work on ux see I this is the audience for a ballom joke um and now you can share these fully functional prototypes with your teams and customers literally in minutes you can manually pour through customer feedback everybody has the spread the spreadsheet um for ideas and priorities now you can automate those insights with no

code tools and then finally there's slides there's so many slides we're making slides all the time and now we're making slides but they're generated by AI so this is you know before and and now this isn't even the future and I think now product work honestly takes less time less thought and and maybe less PMS so what does that mean I think it means it could be become more fun but in order for it to become more fun we have to do what all of us are really fabulous at which is straight up pivot so

we're going to figure out something else we're going to kill product management but we're replace it with something else and so I'm going to start with a couple pieces of advice on how to get there and the first one is you need to become an AI powered product team now and I think there are three requirements of an AI powered PM they automate themselves to speed up delivery they add new skills and they do more and then they multiply their impact by teaching the team and you know I really think you need to automate yourself

to speed up delivery that's task number one and um Jay-Z was asking me behind back backstage she's saying how do you do it all and then she goes AI That's how you do it all including how I do this talk so I was like how can I automate chat PRD how can I automate away all the things that PMS do with AI and I made this to-do list and you'll see how that to-do list was generated with chat Purity as I go through it so I'm going to give you a anti- to-do list these are

things that you should no longer do on your own you should automate these things immediately one is draft documents don't do that that's that's for suckers um two get and give feedback first passive feedback you shouldn't have to give you should get feedback from AI or a tool writing updates how many of you are writing updates daily a lot no one no one's writing updates no one's writing Str okay we got one one product leader back here one guy one guy and me okay uh agenda summaries and action items out of meetings prioritizing feature requests

monitoring goals and okrs even coming up with goals and okrs keeping track of competitors prepping for interviews consolidating candidate feedback if you're doing interviews telling customer stories you know you're the keeper of oh this feature is great because so and so does this or so and so did that uh making slides pretty don't do that and then explaining product functionality we're all just walking support knowledge bases for our product areas none of this you should be doing you should think every every time I do one of these tasks on this anti- to-do list how can

I automate it in the moment and help you speed up delivery overall clear clear the deck and I think there are very easy ways basically my trick here is every time I do one of those things and I think in my heart I wish I didn't have to do this I go spend four to seven minutes trying to figure out if I can manifest a way not to have to do it about 80% of the time I get it done and I ship it and this is not about you know there's this mix people say

oh that saves time but does it increase quality and I'm just using this quote from somebody on my team who says don't look at it as how you can get to 100% look at how you can get to 75% faster than starting from zero and I think people can save days um every week by automating themselves and then I think you really need to use that time to add new skills and do more so this is where we start thinking about how product management is going to change and to embarrass him I'm going to call

out Cody Cody's on our team he leads our um product Innovation and incubation team and Cody actually comes from devil so he's an engineer and Cody has shown and and he was in marketing so he's not a product manager and Cody has just learned how to be an edge prototyper start building product en code and we said hey Cody I'll give you chat PRD you want to be a product manager and he's like sure I'll be a product manager so he already has this propensity to add more skills this is a non-traditional product manager coming

into a product leadership role and using AI to figure out how to be a product product manager but Cody got blocked he was building a product and he's part of a Triad and design had four other priorities and Cody was blocked and instead of saying I'm blocked and I'm a marketer and I'm an engineering prototyper and I'm like kind of a product manager just learning how to do it now and crying he learned how to be a designer so he started using v.d to actually build wire like these aren't even wireframes build beautiful designs and

prototypes for his product as part of his package of requirements to the team and now I mean bless him he's starting to do PRS for frontend code I mean this guy is out out of control and what I think you need to think about is these are the kind of people that are going to come for product jobs these are the kind of people you're going to want to hire and this is the breadth of skills that you're really going to want on your team and in yourself and then of course none of that matters

if it's just one person if it's just a Cody as we say you have to multiply your impact by teaching the team so we actually have a project building with AI Channel at launch darkley um where every day we're sharing different ways we're automating ourselves asking for help building things um and it's the most exciting Channel and I post all the time things that I build because I think as a product leader you have to normalize using these tools to accelerate and build skills so that people don't feel so bashful about it you also have

to fund it but we'll get to that in a minute so this is what I think it takes to be an AI powered pm and an AI powered product team and I think this is how we get to this world where a product World takes less time so you can spend more time with users it takes less thought so you can actually be more creative with the time that you have and then has less PMS with I don't think you all are going to like this I think uh maybe we want to talk about this

one and this is one of most strongly held beliefs about the art of product management which I've made a career out of is I think AI will collapse the talent stack so what I mean is these jobs that have been separate will start to become one and that's really scary and it's a big change but I don't believe and my experience has been it doesn't happen to break your team so first a quick exercise God I'm trying to do arm raising exercises and you all giving me nothing so come along with me how many of

you have given an update in slack this week my God no one's working man okay how many of you have written a document this week okay we're all writing documents all right how many of you have done a design this week few how many of you have written code this week how many of you have deployed code to production this week okay that's th those those five people that's what's coming for us so you know before we really love this idea of the product Triad this product engineering design these leads maybe you had instead of

a stool you had a table you got data in there uh surrounded by supporting engineering and design resources I think this is what has been classically the platonic ideal of a product team for quite some time and I think what's the problem with this is because they're all separate product operates as a handoff mechanism I'm going to handoff requirements to you Design's going to hand off things to engineering I'm going to make sure they know engineering manager is going to hand off things to engineering and they're going to make sure that they know things and

it means you stay really hands off with what actually gets built and so what I think we're moving to now is more of this generalist specialist so you have specialists in product design and engineering ing but at least in my organization they're really expected to participate across the building process they're expected to do the work that needs to get done to move the project forward and the operating principle that we Embrace at launch darkley we call this there are no Lanes so you know there's like stay in your lane and we're like there are no

Lanes if there's something to get done and you have the skill to do it culturally we Embrace getting it done but that's now and I think even this kind of freaks people out because people like their Lanes they like to know products excellent at product stuff so they're going to product the hell out of things and design is great at design stuff and they're going to design things and it gets really uncomfortable where you say well product can do pretty bang up job at design and design actually knows how to push react code and Engineering

could you please just write a PRD yourself you know what we need to do and so I think this already freaks people out but this this really freaks people out so this is what I think is coming for us very soon I think you're going to see what I would call an AI power Triple Threat basically one person that can do engineering design product as a lead of a team which includes AI tools agents and platforms as part of that team and I think this is what we're going to hire for and what's really interesting

is they may spike in engineering they may spike in classic product management they may spike in design but they're going to need to know how to do it all and that Triad goes away and what I think is really interesting about the tri going away is I think we all believe that small teams can generally move faster than big teams I kind of believe individuals can move faster than small teams and so this is kind of an exercise in thinking how fast can opinionated product leadership in a small team move things forward given the tools

that they need and then actually I think it's like maybe everything so you saw those guys hiding in the corner I mean like who knows what we're going to pull into this Vortex of this new role but I do think product managers are ALS Al going to be expected to be more commercially oriented think about Pro marketing more uh use tools for data and so maybe actually we're both dead and reanimated as everything and it's scary people don't like this they don't like it but it doesn't have to be scary I you know I have

a friend that said said this the other day I thought it was really interesting the only people that need to be worried are the people acting like they don't need to be worried which is if you can imagine this future and you say you know Claire's up here trying to give a talk that people tweet out but I buy into her fundamental thesis that things are going to change dramatically think about how that changes for you prepare yourself prepare your team change in advance and make the moves you need to do to be awesome in

this new era as opposed to Obsolete and so I think about this AI will never do this thing is super naive but AI can help me do anything is really inspiring and it gets me amped up about I'm gotting some nods gets me really amped up about what is possible to build and put in the market and create and I just think that's so thrilling okay and then this is the the last part which is product leaders AI is coming for you too so you're like yeah yeah product managers let's just get them and do

a whole bunch more stuff with less headcount that sounds great yeah and then all the SAS providers are like yeah AI agents my tool is your solution they love it but it's never coming for us right there's never going to be an aico no no no it it's coming for you too and I think we all need to be prepared for this change and so first thing is we need to be prepared to manage whatever the hell this thing is I mean this is totally different than what most of us are thinking about in terms

of what our teams are and I think this means that we have to get more commercial skills in our teams especially for my friends out there in B2B Enterprise more technical skills we are going to be expected to manage people who code I'm a cpto basically it's already happening I'm seeing more and more of us that are bringing these functions together when more and more of the individuals have shared shared skills you're going to have to think about how you manage that you're going to have to think about budg budgeting for headcount versus budgeting for

agents and tools and how that changes how you think about the investment in R&D that you're making and then I'm saying we're going to have these artisanally crafted team topologies which is basically like the team is going to be built for the thing that needs to get done we can't all be prescriptive about the Triad as the only way to get something done I say organize around motivated individuals if somebody comes in with this globul shape of skills I would want to build a team around that if somebody spikes on product and I need that

skill on a team I'm going to build that team around them and we're going to have to get really creative with how we design teams in order to be successful uh the other thing I would think about is your experience and your strategy remember my minivan story is becoming a commodity so this is a great article in leny's newsletter about how close is AI to replacing product managers the punchline here is they had like two visions the AI generated one one because of quality even though people knew it was Ai and so I think just

thinking about like how special is all that hard thinking um is really important and so I think you need to skill up and build a moat around what you can bring to the table and what you might be able to bring to the table is running and building and scaling these AI powered teams and it's going to happen really fast to start now the reason why I have the dancing bunny emojis is I sat next to the CEO you would have never guessed wasn't from a fancy Tech forward company was sort of like non-te company

and he was sitting there said what are you doing he's like oh I'm building my digital twin and I don't let anybody in the company ask me questions till they ask my digital twinner question and I was like this guy's got a digital twin I don't have a digital twin and so it really made me think it's going to happen fast and I'm even behind so you really need to start now so here's the tldr on reanimating products since I I killed it you really need to become an AI powered product team now ai is

going to collapse the talent stack there are five people here apparently that have already done it um but care for your culture care for your organization plan accordingly and it will be fine and then product leaders that's coming for you too so join me in thinking what that three to fiveyear Future can look like and manifest it in your team and so if I have any advice to you it's go find those AI powered triple threats give them power and give them budget I think you'll be really really happy you did thank you so much

I really appreciate it [Applause]