The PM Role Is Being Rewritten. Most PMs Are Editing the Wrong Draft.
Everyone agrees the product manager job is changing. Almost no one agrees on what it is changing into. Here is the version I am betting my career on.
There is a comfortable version of the "AI is changing product management" take going around right now. It says PMs will write fewer documents and spend more time "thinking strategically." Everyone nods. Nobody is threatened. It is also mostly wrong.
Here is the uncomfortable version. The parts of the job that were quietly busywork — the PRD nobody finished reading, the status deck, the backlog-grooming theater — are collapsing toward zero. What is left is the part a lot of PMs have spent years avoiding: deciding what is actually true, choosing what to build, and standing behind it when it ships.
The work that is evaporating
I have led product teams at a bank, at Wolters Kluwer, and now on an AI team building for the mortgage servicing market. A shocking amount of the "product" role was translation. Translating business goals into requirements. Translating requirements into tickets. Translating engineering reality back up to executives. That translation layer is now a model that does it in seconds and does not get tired at 4pm on a Friday.
If your value was being the connective tissue between business and engineering, I have bad news: the connective tissue is now an API call.
The work that is left
What does not automate is judgment under uncertainty in a domain you genuinely understand. The model can draft ten roadmaps. It cannot tell you that option three quietly violates a servicing regulation that will surface in an audit eighteen months from now. It can summarize customer interviews. It cannot feel the difference between what a customer says they want and what they will actually pay for.
That is taste, accountability, and domain truth. None of it is new. It was always the real job. AI just stripped away everything that let us pretend otherwise.
What I am doing about it
I set product strategy and I still ship the code. That used to make me a curiosity — the "technical PM" who could read a pull request. Now it is the whole game. When I can prototype the idea myself over a weekend, the conversation with engineering stops being "here is a document, please estimate it" and becomes "here is a working thing, let us make it real and make it safe."
The leverage is absurd. But leverage cuts both ways. A PM with sharp judgment and these tools is now doing the work of a small team. A PM whose value was producing documents is competing with a feature that ships in the next model update.
So no, the role is not getting more "strategic" in the soft sense people mean. It is getting more accountable. The draft most PMs are editing assumes the job gets easier. The real draft says the job gets more exposed — and for the people who actually have judgment, that is the best thing that has happened to this career in a decade.