The AI Apocalypse is the Best Thing That Could Happen to Real Product People 

Far from making them obsolete, AI is ultimately restoring product managers and designers to their rightful place of influence. By automating the mechanical tasks of building and designing, AI has eliminated the bureaucratic “process” roles, exposing those who added little strategic value. This forces a vital shift: when anyone can build anything, the critical question is no longer how but what to build. This decision-making hinges on irreplaceably human traits—intuition, empathy, and cultivated taste—not data or algorithms.

Consequently, the real product leaders will be those with the vision and conviction to edit ruthlessly and guide a product’s purpose. This transition is a renaissance for true product artistry, separating mere facilitators from essential visionaries who will define the next generation of meaningful products.

The AI Apocalypse is the Best Thing That Could Happen to Real Product People 

If you believe the headlines and the LinkedIn hot-takers, it’s time to write the obituary for product managers and designers. Artificial intelligence, the story goes, has democratized creation. Now, any engineer, any marketer, any “SVP of Global Partnerships” can whip up a prototype, design a UI, and define a feature set. Why pay a premium for specialists when the tools are now in everyone’s hands? 

This perspective isn’t just common; it’s seductive. It appeals to a founder’s desire for efficiency and a technologist’s belief in tools. But it’s based on a fundamental misdiagnosis of what’s actually happening. 

AI isn’t making product managers and designers obsolete. It’s firing the imposters and clearing the field for the real ones. For the first time in a long time, the power to decide what to build is becoming more valuable than the ability to build anything. We are not witnessing the end of product; we are witnessing its dramatic return to power. 

The Great Unmasking: From “Frauduct Manager” to Essential Conductor 

For years, the product role in many companies, particularly those chasing hyper-growth, had become bureaucratized. The “product manager” was often less a visionary and more an alignment coordinator—a glorified project manager who shuffled JIRA tickets, facilitated endless meetings, and translated executive whims into backlog items. They were masters of process, not champions of the user. 

This is the “Frauduct Manager” archetype: smart, ambitious people who entered the field for its potential for impact, only to find their role stripped of its creative core. They managed the how, but rarely got to decide the why. 

AI has now automated the how. It can generate user stories, prioritize a backlog based on past data, and even create functional code and high-fidelity mockups. The bureaucratic, process-oriented PM is indeed redundant. And that’s a good thing. 

This forces a necessary and brutal reckoning. When anyone can build anything, the central question for a company is no longer “Can we build it?” but “Should we build it?“ 

The CEO who today is thrilled that their HR manager can ship a new feature will, in a few quarters, be staring at a smoldering wreckage of a product—a Frankenstein’s monster of disjointed ideas, half-baked features, and conflicting user experiences. They will look around the room and ask the most valuable question: “Why are we building so much garbage? Who is going to decide what actually makes sense for our product?” 

That person is the real product manager. 

The New (Old) Core Competency: Taste 

The answer to the “what to build” question won’t come from a data dashboard or an A/B test. AI can run those tests for you by the thousands. The answer will come from something far more human and irreplaceable: taste. 

Taste is that elusive blend of intuition, experience, empathy, and conviction. It’s the ability to see a path forward when the data is inconclusive or doesn’t yet exist. It’s the deeply held belief about what makes a product not just functional, but delightful, meaningful, and ultimately, valuable. 

Taste is what separates a product that merely exists from a product that defines a category. You can’t bootcamp taste. You can’t learn it in a weekend course. It is the artistic core of product management and design, cultivated through years of observation, success, and spectacular failure. For too long, this art was buried under process. AI, by automating the process, is forcing it back to the surface. 

How to Thrive in the New Product Renaissance 

This shift won’t be easy, and not every current PM or designer will make the transition. For those who want to not just survive but lead, the path forward is clear. Seek out environments that value the art of product: 

• Follow the Data Moats: The raw material for the AI age is unique, proprietary data. Public data is a commodity. The real innovation will happen in companies sitting on vast, closed, human-created datasets—think of Reddit’s resurgence driven by AI data licensing. This is the clay from which PMs and designers will sculpt groundbreaking new experiences. 

• Join the Pioneers, Not the Clones: The old playbook of “let them experiment, we’ll copy what works” is dead. In a world of infinite building, first-mover advantage is back. You need to be in companies that operate from conviction and intuition, not fear and mimicry. These are the organizations that will empower you to bet on your taste. 

• Find Your True North: Loyal Users: With AI, your ability to generate hypotheses and prototypes will be limitless. Your constraint will be high-quality user feedback. You need a dedicated community of users who care enough to tell you the truth. Their candid, brutal, and insightful feedback will be the compass that guides your countless experiments away from the garbage and toward genuine value. 

The Bottom Line 

AI hasn’t killed the product star; it has killed the product bureaucrat. It has performed a great unmasking, revealing that many product roles had already lost their purpose long before ChatGPT was a glimmer in Sam Altman’s eye. 

The chaos that AI introduces is not a threat to real product people. It is their opportunity. It is the chance to shed the administrative baggage and reclaim the creative, intuitive, and strategic heart of the job. For those with the taste and the courage to decide what deserves to be built, the product renaissance is just beginning. And it’s going to be fun.