AI will separate the good PM's from the bad. Finally.
AI is only a credit card purchase away and features will become commoditized. The strategic PM will ultimately rise above.
Writing requirements has never been easier. If you’re a Product Manager, and your role is primarily focused on writing rote requirements, your job is a) easier than ever and b) in grave danger. Enter a credit card, open up your favorite LLM and tell the AI what you’d like to build and for who. Then? Sit back and wait for the developers to develop. Until, of course, your company wakes up to the inefficiencies.
Yet, this characterization isn’t fair. Conversely, the strategic PM wakes up each day wondering how the organization can deliver something truly unique. I suspect this type of PM will flourish. In fact, their star will shine brighter than ever before.
Both the successful PM as well as the unsuccessful PM will use AI, because they’d be crazy not to. But they’ll use it much differently and the good PM will learn to mix differentiation strategy with the automation capability that LLM’s afford us. Let’s think through an example…
What if we had a market with ten core competitors. The market is tight and it can often feel like a race for more features, better service or lower prices. If one competitor races ahead with a new feature, and then the market validates the efficacy of that feature, the other nine competitors can write a requirement for that feature in seconds using AI and public information. Heck, the feature can likely be developed quickly with parallelized programming agents building to the requirements. Parity has never been more achievable.
Enter the strategic Product Manager. For years, the PM was advised to not enter a feature race and take on the additional cost of supporting features and the loss of focus. Some listened, most didn’t as pressure from Sales would often lead to a neverending quest for feature parity. Now? The Strategic PM has a new, loftier goal: Identify a unique advantage that cannot be easily replicated. Partnerships, patents, proprietary code, people. These become the assets that the competition can’t mimic with a couple clicks in Claude.
Positioning based on application features is dead. Positioning based on things that Claude simply can’t write a recipe for is the new path to greatness. Easier said than done of course. But they do exist. GitHub, Wordpress and RedHat have leaned hard into a community-first strategy. Apple and Salesforce? Much of their success has been realized through their platform strategy, an endeavor that requires much more than a couple of features.
The Product Manager will now fill a void of crafting or reinforcing a company’s differentiation strategy. Companies without a differentiation strategy will suffer a different fate as they fall into parity price wars with similar companies.
Differentiation has always been the most critical component of strategy. However, AI will create a divide between the companies with a defensible, marketable, indistinguishable strategy and those without.