Week 37, 2026
I was scrolling LinkedIn recently when a post made me stop.
A founder had announced that Claude was their new Product Manager. The plan was simple: replace the PM with three engineers and AI, see what happens, and if the experiment failed, hire another Product Manager again in six months.
The post was generating plenty of engagement. Many comments celebrated the idea. Many people seemed convinced that Product Management had become one of the first knowledge-work functions AI could largely absorb. Strangely, my reaction wasn’t outrage. It wasn’t defensiveness. It wasn’t even concern for the profession. My first thought was much more specific: “I know exactly what’s about to go wrong.” Not the AI. The alignment.
And the interesting thing is that I completely understand why the idea sounds reasonable. If you observe Product Managers from a distance, much of the role appears easy to distribute across a team. People see meetings, roadmaps, requirements, planning sessions, prioritization workshops, customer feedback reviews, and status updates. It can look like a collection of administrative activities rather than a distinct function. In many organizations, Product Management appears to be coordination wrapped in PowerPoint. If that’s all someone sees, replacing the role feels logical. AI is already becoming remarkably good at many of those visible activities. It can summarize conversations faster than I can, although sometimes missing key points due to lack of context. It can organize feedback, draft documentation, generate reports, identify patterns, and even propose roadmaps. Looking at it from the outside, the founder’s experiment doesn’t seem irrational. But as I read through the comments, I kept thinking about something many experienced Product Managers quietly learn after enough successes and failures. The easiest parts of Product Management are the parts people notice. The hardest parts are the parts nobody sees.
The reason Product Management often looks easy to replace is because organizations frequently mistake outputs for value. I’ve seen this throughout my career at Microsoft, Nuance, and elsewhere. People assume the roadmap is the job. They assume the document is the job. They assume the meeting is the job. They assume backlog management, stakeholder updates, planning reviews, and delivery tracking are where Product Managers create impact. The reality is more complicated.
Those things matter, but they are not the source of value. They are evidence that work happened. They are artifacts left behind by work. Organizations often mistake PM artifacts for PM value. The roadmap was never the job. The document was never the job. The meeting was never the job. Those things support something else. Something significantly more difficult to observe. And because it is difficult to observe, it becomes easy to underestimate.
Over the years, I’ve heard Product Management described as “making sure everyone is informed.” That always felt incomplete. There is a massive difference between information sharing and commitment. Information is coordination. Commitment is alignment. Coordination is visible. Alignment is invisible. Sharing information is relatively easy. Getting intelligent people with competing objectives to genuinely commit to a single direction is something entirely different. One creates awareness. The other creates momentum. And momentum is where products actually get built.
When I think back on the hardest product challenges I’ve faced, they rarely involved writing requirements or prioritizing a backlog. The difficult moments happened when intelligent people disagreed. Engineering wanted one solution because it scaled better. Design wanted another because it created a better experience. Sales needed a customer-specific capability. Leadership wanted results faster. Customers were asking for contradictory things. Everyone had a point. Everyone was acting rationally. Nobody was wrong. Yet somehow a decision still had to be made.
People often joke that Product Management is like herding cats. The funny thing is that the joke survives because it contains an uncomfortable amount of truth. Imagine trying to get ten cats onto the same cat tower. One cat wants to nap. One cat wants to chase a toy. One cat wants attention. One cat wants food. Another cat wants to go in the opposite direction purely because that’s where it feels like going.
That’s what a product organization can feel like on a difficult day. Engineering has one priority. Design has another. Sales has customer commitments. Leadership has quarterly targets. Customers have immediate needs. Nobody is behaving irrationally. Everyone is simply optimizing for different outcomes.
The Product Manager usually possesses the least formal authority in the room and simultaneously carries responsibility for helping everyone move toward the same destination. That’s why I’ve never particularly liked the phrase “requirements management.” Most of the time I’m not managing requirements. I’m trying to get a group of intelligent, opinionated, well-intentioned people to climb the same cat tower together. That work rarely appears in a roadmap. It rarely appears in a status report.
And it almost never appears in a performance review. But it is often the difference between a team that moves and a team that stalls. The real work starts when intelligent people disagree. AI can summarize a disagreement. A Product Manager has to resolve it.
That is why I suspect I know exactly what will break first if a Product Manager disappears from an organization. It won’t be the documentation. It won’t be the roadmaps. It won’t be the requirements. Those things can survive for a surprisingly long time. The first thing that weakens is alignment.
The challenge is that nobody notices alignment while it is healthy. Alignment is invisible until it disappears. Successful Product Management often looks like nothing happened. Teams understand priorities. Stakeholders support difficult decisions. Engineers move confidently. Leadership trusts the direction. Customers receive consistent messaging. The organization simply advances. There is no dashboard showing alignment. No report measuring it accurately. No AI summary capturing it completely. The result is simply that people move together. Because there is no visible artifact called alignment, the effort required to create it often goes unnoticed.
Then something changes. Priorities begin drifting. Stakeholders revisit decisions that were already made. Teams interpret goals differently. Meetings multiply. Discussions repeat themselves. Confidence declines. Execution slows down. The moment alignment breaks, everything slows down. Nobody can explain why. Then they start looking for a Product Manager. Not because the roadmap disappeared. Not because requirements stopped being written. Because someone had been quietly holding the organization together. Most people only notice Product Management when it’s missing. The irony is that the better the Product Manager was at creating alignment, the less visible their contribution often became. Successful Product Management often looks like nothing happened. That is usually the sign that it worked.
Most people think Product Managers create value through the things they produce. Roadmaps. Requirements. Backlogs. Presentations. Status updates. AI can help with many of those things. Some of them may eventually become almost fully automated. But that was never the hardest part of the job.
The hardest part was always getting people to move together. Getting a room full of intelligent people with different goals to commit to a single direction. Doing it without authority. Doing it without a fight. Doing it often without receiving credit. That work is invisible. Which is exactly why so many people underestimate it. When I saw the founder announce that Claude was replacing their PM, I wasn’t worried about the AI. I was thinking about the alignment. Because that’s the first thing that breaks. And if my experience is any guide, it will be the reason they hire a Product Manager again. Not because AI failed. But because getting people to move together has always been the real job. Getting people moving in the same direction was the job. The invisible work is often the most valuable work. And that is the one thing most people never see.
This newsletter reflects my personal views and experiences as a product manager. It does not represent the views, strategies, or opinions of my employer or any organization I am affiliated with.
