Should PMs do hands-on technical work with AI tools?

Marty Cagan

Partner · Silicon Valley Product Group

Learn engineering skills

Marty Cagan recommends product managers on feature teams in project-model companies learn as many engineering skills as they can, saying he worries about their current role and they'll be more valuable if they migrate to "build to earn."

Ravi Mehta

Angel Investor · Traveljoy

Focus on strategy

Ravi Mehta says PMs should spend more time figuring out where the product should go and less time building, arguing the idea that everyone should roll up their sleeves and build is exactly the wrong one.

Geoff Charles

CPO · Ramp

Build the factory

Geoff Charles says the technical track for product managers is building the actual factory: identifying bottlenecks and removing drag, and shipping tools that help build products or help AI do so.

Ben Celebicic

Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO) · Hinge

Prototype ideas themselves

Ben Celebicic says product managers can prototype ideas themselves without engineering support, because it lets him put ideas in users' hands and learn quickly whether they're worth building.

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Jonathan Evens

Product Lead · Google Deepmind

Just a PM using AI tools

Jonathan Evens says a PM using AI is just a PM using those tools to improve productivity, not a distinct "AI PM," though he adds that vibe coding and fast prototyping can be helpful skills for AI product managers.

Paweł Huryn

Author, Founder · The Product Compass

Decide and manage

Paweł Huryn says what's left is deciding what to build and managing the agents, which he says are better at coding, reviewing code and soon designing architectures than any human, since coding can be fully delegated.

Lars Grønnegaard Hansen

CPO and Co-Founder · Dreamdata

Handle simple coding

Lars Grønnegaard Hansen says product managers can handle simple coding tasks, like changing copy, because agents make the engineering work easy enough, though an engineer should probably review and merge the pull request.

The answer starts at 36:40.

Nancy Wang

SVP, Head of Engineering and AI · 1Password

Builder‑product engineer

Nancy Wang says engineering is starting to fuse more with product management, calling it the builder or product-engineering persona, since the advantage now lies in judgment, taste and defining the right problem rather than raw output.

Jeff Chow

Chief Product and Technology Officer · Miro

Prototype ideas

Jeff Chow says product managers prototype an idea and share it, saying this visual specification helps teams get requirements better than clinically writing them and drives alignment.

Oji Udezue

Author · Productmind

Focus on judgment

Oji Udezue says PMs should focus on product judgment, pointing to the stages of product development that require it—finding the problem, deciding what to build, getting people to value, making money—rather than the code layer.

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Tom Verrilli

Chief Product Officer · Whatnot

Enable the team

Tom Verrilli says PMs should enable the team rather than ship to production themselves, arguing they have more leverage enabling the team to ship better and faster.

Dianne Na Penn

Head of Product Management, Research · Anthropic

Be hands‑on and ship

Penn says managers must be hands-on and ship, and that she owns one or two work streams herself to keep her sense of how the models are moving and help her team make better decisions.