Product Management

Stop claiming that the PM function is dying!

It’s not dying… in fact, it’s just getting started. There are some challenges though…

The algorithm on Medium is weird. I ventured to read one article on the death of product management, and now I’m inundated with articles that carry garbage claims that the PM function is dead. I sincerely hope that this article makes it into your feed, offering a light out of the artificial darkness imposed by these click-baity articles.

I’ll get straight to the point:

Why won’t Product Management die?

There are 3 strong reasons why PM as a function won’t be buried in a grave anytime soon (unlike NFT Advisors):

1. The PM Function cannot be automated

Ever read an article about what a PM does? If it’s a good one, you’ll notice that it doesn’t lay down day-to-day functions. And if you boil it down to the brass tacks, you’ll find that the function is dynamic — hopping from execution details (and the decision-making that follows it) to strategic orientation. This lends to the function a level of unpredictability, that cannot be mathematically classified.

Formally, there are 3 reasons why I think automation won’t be possible:

1. PMs are founded on experience (which is unique to their choices)
   Your experience as a PM decides how well the product performs (everything else being equal). To automate that would be to write individual pieces of decision-making code for every PM in existence at every stage of their career, for every decision they’ve made.
2. Good PMs inspire confidence
   Every good PM I’ve worked with, had a set of stakeholders and customers who’ll blindly follow the majority of the decisions made. They’re evangelists of not only the product but also the PM. Good luck building an AI that can inspire confidence!
3. Empathy cannot be coded
   As idea generators and framers (framing ideas generated from within the ecosystem), the level of empathy a PM has to have with the customers’ needs cannot be put into numbers. Sure, you can use anomaly detection to identify which stages of the user…