I see a lot of posts here worried that product management roles are being replaced by AI or FDEs with no PM experience. Based on multiple customer sessions over Teams these past few weeks, I see that there’s still many PM skills they won’t be able to replace anytime soon.
I’m a principal PM building B2B enterprise software. I lead multiple dev teams and spend a lot of time in front of customers, both prospects and existing clients. My current feature helps Fortune 500 companies increase their efficiency at the ground level and it’s saved hundreds of millions of dollars across our clients. The primary users are typically tech-averse, they’ve been doing the job for decades, are highly skilled and knowledgeable, and don’t want a feature to “assist” them and tell them there is a better way to do things. But the metrics are showing there is room for improvement and their manager’s manager’s boss wants them to try my feature to see if it saves them money like we say it does.
Our deployment team handles most rollouts, but the biggest clients bring me in during their recurring pilot meetings for that extra care. And usually, one or more people from the C-suite join and want to know the opinion of their employees before deciding to move forward. When I join, often the pilot users are frustrated and saying things like “It’s not working”, “I just want to do it my way”, “it is taking more time to mess with this than it would be to just do the work”, etc. I ask them to show me what’s happening, and it usually turns out to be one of four things:
- A process issue - the feature is doing exactly what it should, but they need to prepare their data differently or interact with it differently.
- Something unrelated - they’re frustrated and they lump in a problem that has nothing to do with my feature as the reason they can’t use it.
- A valid product issue - often it’s a less common workflow we identified but haven’t addressed yet, or a rule we built for another company’s workflow that’s too restrictive for theirs, and sometimes it is an actual bug. I have to quickly figure out if we can solve it, give them a realistic timeline (a week, two weeks, a month, a quarter, etc), and work with the C-suite rep if they’d rather have this feature prioritized over something another part of their company needs from us.
- PEBKAC (not that you ever tell them that) - I walk them through how to use the feature and suddenly it works perfectly (“but it didn’t do it like that when I tried it earlier”)
The hard part is figuring out which one each complaint is from a 30-second demo of their screen in Teams, especially without setting anyone off and making it worse. A lot of my meetings start with people frustrated and end with them happy and optimistic, even when nothing actually changed in the product. I do this multiple times a week, and if you don’t handle it accurately and with a light touch, you lose the client. Then you’ve got a great feature nobody wants to use because it has a bad reputation.
My company has floated the idea of putting engineers in Teams meetings with AI transcripts so they can hear customers directly and use AI to write PRDs and eliminate the need for PMs. I love my developers. They’re talented and really good at what they do. But most of them only know the portion of the feature they personally worked on, and my feature crosses a lot of teams. They could help with their piece, but they couldn’t troubleshoot the end-to-end feature live, and they wouldn’t be able to talk a frustrated user off the ledge. Get most of them talking about their passions and they’ll go for an hour. But put them in front of a frustrated customer who’s been doing their job the same way for 20 years while our product is trying to get them to change that, and it can go sideways fast.
As for having an AI PM, these users are already tech-averse, and having an AI talk to them and transcribe everything would drive them nuts. Nobody who distrusts technology wants to explain their problem to an AI. And AI can’t glance at a workflow and tell whether it’s a bug, a process issue, something unrelated, or user error. Most AI just assumes something’s wrong, placates you, and says it’ll get fixed.
The amount of skill and experience it takes to communicate with a frustrated high-stakes client, troubleshoot things on the fly, offer viable solutions with realistic timelines, and gather the use case information needed to improve the product, all while being friendly, disarming, and not coming off as condescending, that is not something AI or FDEs will be replacing anytime soon.
(On a side note, our company has also started having PMs write Jira tickets and build features with Claude Code to increase output, it seems they are testing the waters to see which role can be replaced first)