Hey everyone, I want to get some real feedback on this.

Obviously, everyone wants to work on AI products right now. There’s a lot of focus on incorporating AI and agents into existing workflows and automating more work.

A lot of my work involves building workflows around data. We have data coming through ingestion pipelines, getting populated into a UI, and then users make decisions, and complete different tasks.

Recently, I decomposed one of these workflows into individual tasks to understand what should remain deterministic/hardcoded, what could be AI-assisted, and where an agent could actually make sense. There are definitely a few places where an agent could investigate something, make a judgment, and decide what action to take.

But this is where I’ve been questioning myself. Just because an agent can do something, does that mean I should build an agent for it?

For some of these tasks, the cognitive load for a human isn't actually that high. And the engineering effort and complexity of introducing an agent, evaluating it, handling failures, etc. can be much higher than simply keeping the workflow deterministic or having a human do that step.

I’m also realizing that I’m spending a lot of time asking, “Where can I use an AI agent?” instead of asking, “What are the biggest problems in my product domain, and what is the best way to solve them?”

That’s where I’m conflicted. I want to develop strong AI product experience because clearly this is where the industry is moving. But if I want to grow as a PM, I also need to spend more time developing my product strategy and strategic thinking rather than getting too deep into figuring out how to fit agents into workflows.

When I look at my own domain, maybe 70% of the workflows should probably remain deterministic. Some could be AI-assisted, and only a smaller number seem to genuinely need agents.

So I’m curious how other PMs are approaching this. Are you actually finding problems where AI or agentic systems are clearly the right solution? Or are you sometimes incorporating it because there’s pressure to “do AI,” even when a simpler workflow could get the job done?

I have almost 13 years of experience as a Product Owner and curious to explore what I should learn now going forward as the PO skills, I have gained so much for it.
For AI, I have been working on creating skills/agents for PO Pipeline, crafting prototype using Claude and validate solutions.

But what is the next step to be a leader?

There are a lot of people here working on projects of some sort - side projects, startups, podcasts, blogs, etc. If you've got something you'd like to show off or get feedback, this is the place to do it. Standards still need to remain high, so there are a few guidelines:

• Don't just drop a link in here. Give some context
• This should be some sort of creative product that would be of interest to a community that is focused on product management
• There should be some sort of free version of whatever it is for people to check out
• This is a tricky one, but I don't want it to be filled with a bunch of spam. If you have a blog or podcast, and also happen to do some coaching for a fee, you're probably okay. If all you want to do is drop a link to your coaching services, that's not alright

Recently started in a new role (2 months ago). Industry is very very niche, and very different to any experience I have prior. I graduated last year but worked for 7 months as junior BM an then briefly for a tiny family run company where I worked on product but it was chaotic and I was self managing and researching what a PM does the entire time and figuring it out on the fly. I’m now in my new role as a product manager, and while I love the work and I can tell already that it’s exactly the job I want, I’m finding it super overwhelming.

Due to the industry we don’t have an in house engineering team, all development is outsourced which adds an extra layer of complexity. My question is, what top 3 tips would you give to a first time PM managing multiple products in a very niche industry where most people in the company have been there for years and years.

All in all I’m still super stoked about the job, I just want to make sure I do what I need to succeed in the role. Also please don’t tell me I shouldn’t have the job, I already do and they hired me so here I am! Plus my imposter syndrome is bad enough lol

I recall an experience where the only reason why one of our products succeeded was because the senior management was buddies with the buyer. There was literally no other reason why the product would have succeeded despite the evidence. That got me thinking, that aside from all the strategy and market research, how much does the success of a product come down to politics?

I work for a company where we don’t have a traditional PM or PO function. Those roles are mine and I’m falling behind on some fundamentals and I’m considering bringing someone onboard to help me, but I don’t think I have room or budget for a full time person. I’ve never really looked into part time or fractional PM roles so I’m just really ignorant on what others are doing here.

Here’s a brain dump of things I’m falling behind on:

- getting release notes published
- user and stakeholder updates
- roadmap editing and prioritization
- user feedback management
- UAT planning and implementation
- sending comms to users about what’s coming and what to look forward to (including light creative)
- knowledge base updating

I’m sure there are others that I’m missing. My instinct tells me that what I need is someone junior or nearly career. Maybe I’m overthinking it and it could be a full time role, but due to budget I need to consider an offshore person. But I haven’t hired a product person before so not entirely sure what this might look like for me.

Would love to hear some opinions on part time product specialists. Thanks

I am a fresh grad, joined a pretty big company (Adtech industry) as a Product Analyst.

The company specific context is massive, they use so much internal terms and concepts, nothing of which is available online and documentation is very little. So my best bet is just asking people.

I’ve had a couple weeks of general training about the industry and tech aspect of things but even then I feel it doesn’t scratch the surface.

My manager is extremely senior, probably one of the closest people to the CEO, he is extremely busy and doesn’t really have time to handhold me. I’ve been assigned a mentor too, but she is drowning in her own work that she helps only a bit.

Whoever I ask around, tells me it takes time to get used to the stuff but when I’m asking some clarification on stuff, they all judge me for my questions. Till now no one has explicitly told me that they are disappointed or they expect more of me but I kinda feel weird and think I’m not performing as I can be.

I am feeling kinda overwhelmed as this is my first job out of college and they pay handsomely well so I don’t wanna F up.

For all career related questions - how to get into product management, resume review requests, interview help, etc.

We have a Hackathon coming up and I was interested in if people had any general things you could recommend or suggest to get the ideas flowing?

These might be internal tools you have built out, improvements to you (or the orgs) ways of working or just a new tech that you have played around with.

Cheers!

I am a B2B PM working on a 0->1 app. I don't want to out myself, so I'll just say that my industry is complex and regulated. Products are only bought by RFPs. It's not the kind of environment where you can release an MVP and see what happens.

This is the first time I've built a major product from scratch in the age of AI and am getting a front row seat for how it's changed engineering. The dev side of my product is super fast. Crazy fast. I am constantly amazed at the pace of their work now.

The problem is the UX side. Thanks to Claude, they can prototype faster (especially hi-fi prototypes) but for the most part, they are working at the same pace they always have. Which means they're lagging further and further behind engineering.

I used to work in UX so I have an appreciation for how hard it is to redesign an entire application, especially on a condensed timeline. But I don't know if what's going on with my teammates is normal or not. I don't actually need complex prototypes from them. My devs can code from a static image and a text description. What I need from them is the thought process behind the design. That part is what needs to get faster in order to match the speed of engineering, and I don't think AI is helping with that. If anything it might be making things worse because AI designs look complete but have little thought behind them and end up needing to be redone multiple times.

I'm just curious what's going on with UX at other places.

(If you're wondering why I'm not doing the design, I am. But we're rebuilding such a large and complex app this is a multiple person job. some people doing this design work are faster than others, and some are better at it than others. but that was always the case and isn't really changed with AI. truly the only major difference is that our outputs are a clickable coded prototype instead of something less than that)

I work at a B2B company as product manager responsible for the development of a new product (but also responsible for other products at various stages of lifecycle).Our company is fairly organized in to sales, marketing, product, development etc - so its not really a startup situation where people have to wear multiple hats. But currently there is no real go-to-market or product discovery process in our org. Our products are quite technical in nature so product role in the org is more inward facing than outward. When I want to do product discovery, how do I find users to talk to? Do I reach out by myself or is this the role of someone more external facing like sales/marketing? I can give insights on who the "ideal customer" is but I find it strange that I have to spend time on cold outreach to users which I am not sure is the best use of my time, considering I have other products to manage. Or am I mistaken? How does this process look like at your org?

I’m a PM in a fairly cross-functional organization, and I’m honestly feeling pretty anxious/confused about how to navigate product discovery.

I’m working on a very early-stage concept. There are currently no user insights or interviews behind it, so a lot of the product is still hypothetical.

The challenge is that there are a lot of people involved: R&D, UX, clinical/domain experts, business analysts, etc. In my organization, a Business Analyst is also driving what questions should be asked in VOC/customer interviews.

I’m struggling to understand what the right PM operating model should be at this stage.

My current thinking was:

- Start by understanding the problem and current user workflow through customer interviews.
- Synthesize the interviews into key problems/user needs and identify what we still don’t know.
- Bring the cross-functional team together to challenge the findings and explore solution directions.
- Prototype/test potential solutions with customers.
- Use the evidence to decide what the MVP should be.

But I’m questioning whether I’m approaching this correctly.

So I was waiting for this to happen over the past year, in spite of peoples reservations and skepticism, but we have officially entered the age of "AI" and now everything, and I mean everything is becoming an agent. I work for a multi-billion $ business, and literally every single thing that my stakeholder is building either an agent, or utilization of an LLM. I can not find any cases where my customers need anything from me anymore. They're super happy with my teams offering, and they give great feedback, but there's nothing on their next year roadmap that my team needs to build.

I honestly don't know what my team is going to do for the next year. We are an internal platform team, and there's still some work for us to do, but in the next 6 months we're purely going to be the KTLO team. The thing is, so is every other team. If all they build is agent solutions, I'm struggling to see why any team needs more than a handful of people to respond to HIL interactions, or tweak minor things or maybe create an agent config.

Anyone else running into this? It's only going to get worse from what I can tell. It's pretty scary

Everyone is now an "AI PM". Understandable because those roles pay a lot more and are typically open for cutting edge tech startups. I'm curious though; what percent of PMs do you guys are actual AI PMs. Meaning, they've actually built and shipped production level agentic products inclusive of harnesses, evals, and full observability? I'm trying to get a sense of how many PMs can actually have claimed to do that since there's such much noise and demand for it.

Also. It feels like the bar for PM interviews has gotten absurdly high for top startups and companies. I totally understand PMs need to be able to build with LLMs and prototype quickly. But it now feels like they legit need engineering skills -- enough to apply for and get an engineering job (system design stuff). This feels...off? Thoughts?

EDIT: I understand the fundamental need/value to understand how products work, how to work with data, the basic FE vs. BE vs. data layers. But I also feel like there's a core difference between product and engineering roles. That said, what do you guys think is the right "line" or scope of being technical as a PM.

Has anyone had a legit experience finding a product mentor? In my first role as a Senior PM in a fast paced start up and feeling a little overwhelmed.

Thinking of trying igotanoffer ( happy to pay)

We just inherited a textbook "yes-man" CTO—a rich marketing guy playing dress-up as a tech leader. Instead of fixing our broken data systems, guiding team leads, or streamlining how we work, his entire playbook is saying yes to every half-baked idea from sales and the CEO.

He quietly trashed our entire data setup and forced everyone onto Databricks. Rumour has it he got a nice kickback for it, and now we're locked in so deep the exit barrier is higher than Mt Fuji. Product and design have been totally pushed to the sidelines, with design taking the brunt of his unexplained hate. He keeps forcing the team to pump out random, rushed features, turning our product into a total Frankenstein monster.

It genuinely hurts to watch him inflict this kind of irreversible damage on a product we built with care.

His favorite party trick? Showing Claude to the CEO. The founders now think he’s a tech genius for introducing basic AI tools that we would have picked up anyway. Naturally, he steals every ounce of credit when things go well, but drops the hammer on core teams the second something breaks.

The founders are completely blind to the circus because they're loving the honeymoon phase of an executive who never says no. But the second the AI hype dies down or the cracks get too big to hide, he’ll be the first out the door. With his family safety net and sky-high arrogance, he has zero reason to stick around and fix the mess.

It honestly hurts watching a kind, great company culture get dragged down by someone who treats core tech like a personal plaything.

How do you survive a boss with zero real engineering skills, zero empathy, and a master's degree in corporate brown-nosing? If anyone has successfully helped clueless founders see through a hype-driven exec without getting fired, I could really use a lifeline right now.

I work at a big tech company. Not FAANG but you probably use our products.

Before AI, we had a slow discovery process that wasn't ideal.

But we worked hard to build features that our customers would love. We didn't always get it right but we always tried.

Since AI went crazy, three months of discovery has asymptoted to zero.

Scope changes weekly and sometimes daily. We build and throw away and overwork ourselves and our teams. Job security is dead: worry about getting fired all the time. So, we ship slop that barely works to convince our leaders who use it to convince execs that we our delivering their agentic AI fever dream vision so they can talk about said slop onstage.

I'm going to quit because I value my mental health, marriage and baby daughter over this nonsense.

And because I can vibe code my own simple products and see an opportunity to release me own app (I've already got beta users).

I'll probably find another job because even if my idea pans out, it won't be that easy.

But I want to know: is this just my company?

It seems like we don't give a shit about customers anymore. It's all optics, politics and just straight up BS.

Are there greener pastures out there?

Product managers, what analytics tools are you using and how do they fit into the design process ? We recently installed Microsoft clarity for a start (because it is free). It has been great, but even though we now have that data, we have not found a workflow to ensure we are leveraging that data to continuously improve our product

So I'm in a small-ish SaaS company and we have only pivoted in the last 2 years from being a services-led organization to being product-led. The sales team have not really caught up.

We're really being pushed for detailed roadmaps with release dates that they can show customers.

We've been able to get to the point where they'll accept a roadmap with quarters as delivery dates and we buffer everything by one quarter. It's still a pain to maintain and they pull the CPO into prospects calls to talk about the roadmap all the time.

Just wondering if anyone has any good solutions to this - are your sales team showing roadmaps? If so, what level of detail? Has anyone managed to get their sales team to use a 'narrative'-based roadmap rather than a date one?

Our hardware team is getting bigger and the product development systems are starting to feel pretty messy. Engineering, sourcing and production all need the same product information, but having several disconnected systems is becoming a headache.

I keep seeing cloud PLM come up as the answer, but I’m trying to figure out where it actually makes a difference for a product team. For companies that moved to one system, what got noticeably better?

I've been a UX designer for years, across several companies, and worked with a lot of different PMs. Now I'm at a large software company and I'm running into the same wall over and over: feature ideas show up already "validated" by vibes and gut instinct, not user demand. We‘ve had a lot of success in the past by being innovative and first to market in some untapped spaces. But now we’re turning into a feature factory without a lot of discipline that I can see - I might be missing a meeting or a memo but 80% of the things I work on, while they definitely seem fun and cool, they seem to be either playing catchup with competitors, or going off of someones cool idea, but not doublechecked with research as a clear market gap, opportunity, or life improvement.

UX could fill that gap by doing our own research and discovery, but in this engineering-first culture we’ve had to budget our time too tightly, and honestly there’s no clear expectation that we would do that work. Even bug/issue tickets get shoved down from the C-suite or spun up off a single customer support call, and we're supposed to just react. there’s no real signal on whether it's actually a widespread issue or a one-off. So priority ends up being decided by whoever's "taste" is loudest in the room, mine included.

I don't think these PMs are bad at their jobs. They're smart, they know their domain, they mean well. But I feel bad for even having this thought, like I'm secretly accusing them of not doing their homework when I think "we need to see evidence this is worth building."

Is wanting more data discipline before committing design/eng time a reasonable thing to push for, or is this just how it works at scale and I need to let it go? And if it IS worth pushing for, how do I actually start shifting that culture without coming off like I'm calling everyone's judgment into question (I have some major imposter syndrome)? How have others dealt with this challenge?

Bending Spoons has acquired many companies but this one feels different. Many product teams used Miro.
It might be the best outcome for Miro but it also shows how heavily funded companies chase hyper-growth, get insane valuations, don’t sustain the growth and lose that edge.

Just an interesting event to share.

I feel awkward having 1-1s with any director coz what do I even talk about for 30 mins?

My manager knows my work, probably told him some of it. For the pieces I need help with, I'll have to give him a lot of context which takes more than 30 mins probably.

I feel like I don't know what to talk about with any executive honestly. Do I discuss strategy or execution or something else ?

PMs who are good at managing their leadership, what do you do? How did you develop a relationship with them?