When I first heard about product management as a career field in 2013, I was instantly drawn to it.

A career where you get to build solutions to people’s problems? A “mini-CEO” role with a pretty attractive paycheck? The prestige of having the influence on the outcome and direction of a company?

Sign me up!

But that was more than a decade ago. Even leading up to the pandemic of 2020, product management was a hot career field — comparable to the investment banking role of the 90s. In fact, we saw strong growth of the role from 2018-2022 (~30% YoY), where 2022 had a surge of hiring for PMs as companies doubled down on accelerating product development.

Then…

Product roles then were centered around high autonomy with product partners (Engineering, Product, and Design, also known as EPD) with the sole goal of “grow at all costs” (i.e. the rise of the growth product manager) and get shit done. Companies were much looser with cash and unit economics of features. Teams would be co-located and spend countless hours together — developing a strong bond, camaraderie, and in turn, shipped fast. There’s a case to be made for co-located product teams, but that’s for another post. Interviews were tough, but less scrutinized.

Now…

Product roles are more heavily scrutinized in their value add, and the rapid rise of AI has blurred the lines between roles. AirBnb was famous for the reclassification of product managers to product marketers. Keeping up with AI in its rapidly evolving development and the FOMO of incorporating it into your roadmap has been extremely stressful. Teams want to do more with less, and companies are expecting EPD teams to leverage AI to adapt to each other’s functions (e.g. PMs should create prototypes, a function typically owned by UX; UX should be able to do discovery and code, etc.) And the interviews? Absolutely intense as “vibe coding” is now making its way into the already exhausting interview loops. Fully distributed teams further emphasize the importance of continuous alignment — which can sometimes be exhausting through multiple video conference meetings. The barrier to entry has always been high, but now it’s even higher.

PMs today are more burned out than ever, exacerbated by a multi-year rise in layoffs.

Competition for Product roles is exponentially increasing, while at the same time, companies are assessing the value and need of PMs — especially with the disillusionment that other members of the EPD team can assume one another’s roles with AI.