Jason M. Lemkin and a co-speaker argue that AI agents will reshape product management by handling wireframing and spec writing, pushing human PMs toward higher-level strategy. They introduce the "Dark Factory" concept: AI breaks down complex projects into validated pieces. Those who master orchestrating agents will have a decisive advantage over the next three years.
Your average PM at Klaviyo pre-AI who's working on wireframes and specs now has to become an L3 in your hierarchy? Oh yeah, absolutely. Yes. And then there's— I believe you. I'm just learning.
Yeah. There's no, there's, you know, what we want to tell you, there's been very little pushback on this. It's a, look, it's a little intimidating because there's, okay, well, the slope is steep. But when we said, look, the reality is, yeah, one of the things I think about that I share with There's so few people that are gonna get there in the next year or two. If those skills are gonna be so valuable, if you truly are not talking about AI, right? Yes. But if you're the kind of person that's, I can put an agent to work and actually have it produce value. If I can put a team of agents to work that could decompose a problem, right? And do each of the pieces, and I can find a way to check those and validate those, you're gonna be able to take on bigger projects. If you can do that, Klaviyo or otherwise, you are gonna be enormously successful in the, the next 3 years.
Without, without question. Right. Do you think Maybe just 2 questions, because I didn't know you talked so much about Dark Factory. For the non-developers, are they getting close to programming in English, to coding in English? Do they still need to understand code, or do you think they could almost code in English?
Yeah, so there's a little course we teach internally about system decomposition. By the way, this one I'll give you just a quick analogy. I was talking with our people team about this. I should, we showed them this, this on the software pattern we did, this, this idea of contracts between software systems. Yeah. Hey, what does the front end do? What does the backend do? They took that and said, oh my gosh, we have to think through what the jobs of the future are. And they said, I said, like, why don't you use the same program to tear that apart and figure out what does like a marketer or salesperson or engineer actually do in real contractual terms, right? I know this feels sucky. I think, look, a lot of humans, we're used to these kind of fuzzy interfaces and then we'll meet, what, meetings to kind of figure out what each person's gonna do.
