Speaker A argues PMs are obsolete because AI moves too fast for year-long roadmaps. Lenny Rachitsky disagrees, saying PMs still decide what to build and align teams around a vision, much like a CEO does. AI automates development, not strategy.
Chapters
The idea of a PM makes no sense in the future. If you think about decomposing the logic, what does a PM usually do? They take these inputs from customers. They create this sequential roadmap that's well organized over the next year, blah, blah, blah, blah. That world is ridiculous. Like right now, the capabilities of foundation models or companies like Lovable are just improving such a rapid rate that it makes no sense to have a year-long roadmap. There are things that were impossible to do in November that are actually pretty easy to do right now in March. And so I think you need to build an organization that's incredibly adept at changing the roadmap almost on the fly.
So I want to try to defend that role. So the way I see it is as AI makes it easier to build and kind of eats the middle of the software development process, the gap, at least for now, is figuring out what to build and then aligning everyone around what to build.
I agree with that. I actually think like whether you talk about someone who used to be a PM or someone who used to be a designer, the skill is more like being a CEO now, which is what are we building and why?
