The tech careers product leaders would bet on as AI does more work
Five members of the Product Careers work group on the roles and skills they would bet on as AI makes prototypes cheap.
Updated
These product leaders would bet on roles that own an outcome: the economics of an AI feature, the rules and evaluation behind it, or the choice among competing prototypes.
- Own the outcome. Ravi Mehta would look for roles that own the economics of what AI helps build, since a feature can gain usage and still lose money on model costs. Nikhyl Singhal has seen younger AI companies bring in PMs later, with three doing work that seven might have done before, and says they seek people who can scale a product and stay close to the work.
- Keep the judgment calls. Sachin Rekhi uses AI to synthesize interviews at Notejoy, then reads the customer quotes himself before deciding what to build. Hadar Dor would take trust and safety, regulatory product and AI evaluation seriously, because people still define the rules and own the results. In her coaching, Yue Zhao sees making a call with incomplete information as a durable skill.
- Bring evidence an employer can check. Sachin suggests building two working versions of a fix for one pain point, putting both in front of customers and letting what they do pick one. Nikhyl suggests early-career PMs build a small product with users, run the interviews themselves and record the decisions feedback changed. Yue suggests building an AI agent for a repetitive part of your work and showing what problem the saved time let you solve.
- Lead because you want the accountability. Yue expects smaller teams to thin some middle-management layers, so moving into management purely for career security looks risky to her. She calls that a forecast. Ravi would pursue product leadership when you can improve decisions across several teams and want to answer for their outcomes. If you are still building customer judgment, he suggests deepening IC skills first.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How do you decide what role to take next?
Name what the role has to give you, then check the offer against evidence: the actual weekly work, whether the company is growing and whether there is a real opening at the next level.
Is a bigger title at a smaller company worth it?
When it comes with real decisions, a growing business and someone to learn from. Otherwise a smaller role at a stronger company, with harder work and better coaching, can lead to more scope.
When should you switch career tracks?
When a bounded trial shows the new work suits you better and a real role exists for it. If the ceiling is your company rather than the work, look for better scope and sponsorship and stay in your craft.
How do you know when to leave a job?
Make one specific request first, with a date to revisit it. Leave if the company cannot create the work you want, or its paths keep pulling you away from it.
How do you prepare to leave a job and start a company?
Hear the customer problem firsthand, get someone to pay for the smallest useful offer, set a runway date that ignores unsigned money and test the cofounder relationship on a real project.
How do PM, designer and engineer roles differ now?
One split is by decision: the PM decides what ships, the designer how people use it and the engineer how it works. Before product-market fit the founder may make the PM's call.
How do you move into product management?
Most reliably from an adjacent role at your own company. Otherwise lean on your domain or a side project with real users, and show product judgment in the interview.
How do you build product analytics skills?
Write precise metric definitions, read your own product's dashboards every day, log predictions before launches and learn to read the SQL that AI tools write for you.
How should you prepare for a performance review?
Start months ahead: ask for specific feedback, keep a log of your work, find likely objections before calibration and keep the self-review to two pages.
How do you get promoted to the next level?
Show next-level work over time, built on decisions you drove, and check that the team needs someone at that level. If it has no room, a growing team may offer a clearer case.
What should you do in your first 90 days in a new role?
Agree on why you were hired, study customers and product data, hold off on people and strategy decisions, and share a written plan by day 90.
What should early employees know about startup equity?
Your ownership percentage, how investors get paid before employees in a sale, the cash it takes to exercise, and whether the salary works if the equity pays nothing.
