Good News: The PM Role Is Not Dead. Bad News: Yours Might Be.

The future of product management did not come up much in 2022. In 2023, people were still busy shipping, hiring, and building roadmaps. The vibe was expansion: more PMs, more features, more everything.

Then something changed. The layoffs started. AI got good very fast. And suddenly, every product leader I get on a call with has this look. You know the look. It is the look of someone who is doing well professionally, has no immediate reason to panic, and is lowkey panicking anyway.

I am a product consultant working across different companies and industries. Over the past year and a half, one question has followed me from call to call like a golden retriever that refuses to go home.

“Does the PM role still exist in five years?”

I have heard it from people who just got promoted, from people managing teams of fifteen, and from people who built entire careers on this role and are not sure what to make of the world right now. The anxiety is real, it is widespread, and honestly it is not entirely unreasonable.

So instead of giving the usual fortune cookie answer, I started asking back. Here is what four product leaders told me.

The Senior PM Who Realized She Was an Expensive Telephone

The first was a Senior PM at a SaaS company. Eight years in product. Sharp. A little tired.

She told me that two years ago, writing specs was basically her whole job, translating what the business wanted into something engineering could build. “I thought I was adding value,” she said. “Turns out I was just an expensive telephone.” She laughed. I laughed. Then she told me AI now does that work in twenty minutes and nobody blinks.

In five years, she thinks the only PMs left standing will be the ones genuinely close to their customers. Not “I glanced at the NPS dashboard” close. Actually talking to people. Catching things no dataset would ever catch. “Everything else,” she said, “good luck.”

The Group PM Who Watched Timelines Collapse

The second was a Group PM at a video streaming company. His thing was speed, not shipping speed, but expectation speed.

“Two years ago a prototype took two to four sprints. Now if you can’t show something working in 48 hours, leadership starts asking if you need help.” As anyone who has worked in a company knows, that is not actually an offer of help.

He thinks the PM title survives, but the job description gets rewritten completely. Less coordination theater. More owning the outcome. I asked if that felt like more pressure. “Sure,” he said. “But I became a PM to make decisions. For a long time the job was mostly everything else.”

The Healthcare PM Who Said Roadmaps Are No Longer a Hiding Place

The third was a Product Leader in healthcare software. More measured than the others.

The change he felt most was accountability. “Two years ago you could hide behind a roadmap. Here is what we are building. Here is the timeline. Very safe.” Now, however, everyone can generate a backlog. Anyone can write a PRD. “So if that is your value,” he said, “you are in trouble.”

The PMs thriving, in his view, are the ones who can get on a call with skeptical stakeholders and defend an actual decision. Not a document. A decision. With their name on it.

The VP Who Said the Role Already Split Eighteen Months Ago

The fourth was a VP of Product at a startup. He barely let me finish the question. “The role already split,” he said. “About eighteen months ago. Most people missed it.”

On one side, PMs using AI to do more of the same, faster. More tickets, more slides, more output. On the other, PMs using the freed time to get genuinely closer to the actual problem. “Two completely different career trajectories,” he said. Then he paused. “The uncomfortable part? Most PMs think they are in the second group. Most of them are in the first.”

I did not have a follow-up for that one.

So What Does the Future of Product Management Actually Look Like?

Honestly, both the pessimistic and optimistic answers are probably right depending on who you are.

The pessimistic version is real. Companies are already running leaner product teams. Junior professionals using AI are outperforming senior PMs who are not. The parts of the job that used to take a week now take an afternoon. If you have built your entire identity around writing the spec and owning the Jira board, that is a genuinely uncomfortable place to be right now.

The optimistic version, however, is also real. The work left after AI handles the busywork is the work most PMs became PMs to do in the first place. Understanding what users need before they can articulate it. Making the call when the data is split fifty-fifty. Convincing a skeptical engineering team that the next bet is worth their effort. That work is not going anywhere. If anything, it is getting more valuable because fewer people can actually do it well.

The PM Profile That Will Still Matter in Five Years

I am not a fortune teller. Nevertheless, here is what I keep coming back to after all these conversations.

The PMs who will still be relevant in five years will probably look a bit strange by today’s standards. They will have enough technical fluency to prototype something real without waiting for engineering — not because they became engineers, but because AI gave them the leverage to close that gap. At the same time, they will have the intuition and sensitivity that no model has figured out yet. The ability to sit with a frustrated user and understand what is actually going on. The judgment to know when the data points one way and the right answer is something else entirely.

Part engineer. Part therapist. Fully accountable.

Which honestly sounds exhausting. But also kind of amazing.