The arrival of AI as a creative partner and co-author means we’re entering an era where the cost of building a product approaches zero. That doesn’t make building irrelevant. It makes it foundational: a necessary but in and of itself insufficient step. The winners will be the ones who pair that speed with thoughtfulness. Who use the time saved by automation not to crank out more features, but to get closer to the user, to test better hypotheses, to sweat the details that AI can’t see.

AI is turning all of us into passable designers, average developers, and decent writers. But not experts. And if we’re not careful, we’ll start mistaking volume for value, and output for outcomes. “I can, therefore I will” is a thought process that destroys companies.

If AI begins to assume all roles in the product development process — acting as product manager, designer, and engineer — we’re not just witnessing an evolution in product development; we’re staring at an extinction event for traditional workflows. With AI serving as both strategist and executor, organizational communication would become highly structured, frictionless, and nearly instantaneous. But what does this really mean?

The problem with unchecked and unintentional complexity is that it gradually narrows the 'solution space' — the range of future improvements, adjustments, or innovations that can be realistically pursued. Picture the solution space as a playground where designers and developers have room to explore new ideas and tackle emerging challenges. As complexity accumulates without careful management, walls begin to form in this playground, limiting the freedom to experiment and improve. Changes become riskier, and small tweaks can lead to a cascade of unintended consequences. The more convoluted the system, the fewer opportunities there are to introduce meaningful, impactful updates without further complicating the product or alienating users.

Are LLMs coming for your job as a Product Manager? Not so fast. While tools like ChatGPT are powerful, they still fall short of replacing the creative and logical reasoning that PMs bring to the table. In this post I explore four critical blockers that will keep PMs indispensable in the evolving tech landscape.