Comment by clickety_clack
1 day ago
Ugh. I worked with a PM who used AI to generate PRDs. Pretty often, we’d get to a spot where we were like “what do you mean by this” and he’d respond that he didn’t know, the AI wrote it. It’s like he just stopped trying to actually communicate an idea, and replaced it with performative document creation. The effect was to basically push his job of understanding requirements down to me, and I didn’t really want to interact with someone who couldn’t be bothered figuring out his own thoughts before trying to put me to work implementing them so I left the team.
Well that's when you escalate the concern (tactfully and confidentially) to your resource manager and/or the Product Manager's resource manager. And if they don't take corrective action then it's time to look for a new job.
If I was stuck there I probably would have pushed it, but I had better options than setting out on an odyssey to reform a product team.
It got me thinking that in general, people with options will probably sort themselves out of those situations and into organizations with like-minded people who use AI as a tool to multiply their impact (and I flatter myself to think that it will be high ability people who have those options), leaving those more reliant on AI to operate at the limit of what they get from OpenAI et al.
What the heck, the universal job description of a PM is to genuinely understand the requirements of their product. I'm always baffled how such people stay in those roles without getting fired.
For consideration, one can pretty objectively determine a programmer who is not qualified. Secretary. CFO. Sysadmin. How would one judge a product manager? That there's no product? That it sucks balls? "We're soliciting feedback and finding product market fit, iterating, A/B testing, we'll be better next quarter, goto 1"
I wouldn't want that job, but I also don't currently know how to bring demonstrable evidence that they're incompetent, either
I have roughly the same opinion about UX folks, but they don't jam up my day to day nearly as much as PMs
My only answer to this is, the ones at the top up to the CEO must be mindful enough to realize this, smart enough to figure out a solution, and brave enough to act on it.
Otherwise, it's a matter of time until the house of cards falls down and the company stagnates (sadly, the timescales are less of a house of cards, and more like a coal mine fire).