PMs as Tastemakers

AI is already changing the world, but closer to home, it is changing the product management role too. Smart people like Claire Vo and Lenny Rachitsky have been discussing this extensively online. Realistically, we all know that much of the product role can and will be automated.

I’m not mad about it. Though I do it begrudgingly, I don’t enjoy the rote, process-oriented aspects of PM-ing. I think this is true for most PMs. I recently fed a rather large vision document to ChatGPT and had it create tickets for me, with acceptance criteria ready for engineers to pick up. I use AI for competitive research all the time. I also brought in an AI-native product feedback tool at work which pulls data from everywhere our customers live. My job is just easier with AI.

It’s becoming more obvious that outside of stakeholder management and interpersonal relationships, there’s not that much value product managers are adding. While there is merit to PMs learning how to prompt engineer and build prototypes, I’d argue developing a unique perspective or more nebulously “taste” is going to keep this function alive.

In a world of mass production, being original is the only way to differentiate. Translated to a product role, I think this means solving problems in non-obvious ways. If every other product is doing “X”, then figure out a unique “Y”. If there’s a specific design paradigm that has become boring and predictable, come up with a new one. Find ways to put your signature on things.

As product people, we’ve left the “doing” to others for a long time. We drew the line around PMs and said it was enough to identify the problem and let designers and engineers figure out how to solve it. And this worked pretty well in the pre-AI world. But if we continue down this road, we’re not going to have much left to do. Anu Atluru has written about this in her post Taste is Eating Silicon Valley.

Code is cheap. Money now chases utility wrapped in taste, function sculpted with beautiful form, and technology framed in artistry.

There can be many tastemakers in a company. I’d expect the founder to lead the charge. However, developing and identifying taste is hard. Permeating taste is hard. Not all founders even have taste — though I think that will become more of a pre-requisite as investors become arbiters of taste. Product people are in a great position sitting as we do at the intersection of business, design, and engineering to be the tastemakers.

I dislike the “PMs are CEOs” trope but “PMs as tastemakers” is more palatable to me. We get to decide how products are built and influence every part of the organization to craft experiences that are novel and unique. If we don’t rise to that challenge, I fully expect product-minded engineers or designers to usurp the product role.

If PMs want to survive—and this is a call to action for me, too—we need to get creative.