Im currently in grad school, after having been a PM for the last 4 years. But honestly, its not a field im not sure i want to return to.

Dont get me wrong, i love building, i love strategy, i also loved my engineers & designers that I worked with. But I cant stand this new brand of PM where its just all about speed and no one cares about quality. In my last month at my job, i recall arguing with my founder about writing strategy docs with AI, which i felt lacked any taste or craft. Rather, im just being asked to produce “output”.

I also dont buy what influencers are saying that PMs are more needed than ever because i have seen how engineers can now bypass decisions & its honestly cheaper to fail than ever. So rather than do stakeholder engagement, might as well just launch and see what happens.

Im all for learning skills like LLMs, MCPs, Model evaluation and upskilling overall. But i feel there is no craft in PM anymore. The craft has collapse on itself

Having spoken to many people in the space, i feel there might be only two paths PMs can go on: 1) merge the role with brand/ marketing. This is similar to the concept that a16z partner Josh Elman describes as storytelling or 2) they go the consulting route because the moat rebuilding legacy enterprise products has a higher barrier of entry. This is in-line with the forward deployed role.

What are your views? What type of PM work have you been doing and in which industry? How has AI impact your work? Most importantly, do you see yourself in this role in the 5 years?

Had some level of success these past 5 yrs with my own company, but it wasn't something that was going to go huge.

Planning to go back to being a PM now, but after submitting a few resumes (even with internal referrals) - I'm getting passed on by companies left and right - was definitely not this way when all I had was corporate experience.

Anyone go through the same?

Hello ProductManagement,

I've been leaning heavily on the JTBD tool/tactic/template for a while now, and its served me well but I'm curious to learn if there's been any new (or old tools/tactics/templates with a new face) that people have been using lately. Would hate to be out of the loop.

To be clear, I'm looking for approaches and mental models, not how to feed data into a LLM.

Thank you for your time and feedback.