There’s a fascinating conversation bubbling up that goes beyond the usual ‘AI will change everything’ platitudes. We’re seeing AI tools get incredibly good at core PM tasks: summarizing user interviews, drafting user stories from a simple brief, and even running preliminary market analysis. This isn’t a threat; it’s a fundamental shift in our value proposition.
If an AI can generate a PRD or synthesize a thousand pieces of feedback in seconds, what is our core function? It’s moving from execution to orchestration. Our value is no longer in the meticulous crafting of the artifact but in the strategic quality of the prompt. It’s in our ability to ask the right questions, to set the vision, to navigate complex human dynamics with stakeholders, and to apply an ethical lens that AI can’t.
We’re seeing this evolution firsthand as we build tools at https://leera.io to help teams make sense of complex user data automatically. The goal is to free up PMs from the ‘what’ so they can focus entirely on the ‘why’ and the ‘how.’ We’re not just managing a backlog; we’re curating the inputs for our new, super-powered AI teammates.
This leads me to a big question for this community: As AI handles more of the tactical ‘glue work,’ what is the single most important skill a product manager needs to cultivate for the next five years?