A New Day Has Begun

Memories are funny things.

You never seem to remember the things you think you should. I couldn’t tell you what I had for dinner three Tuesdays ago, or where I placed my car keys 5 minutes ago but I can still remember commercials I watched as a kid.

That’s strange when you think about it.

Entire years disappear, but somehow Phil Rizzuto pitching The Money Store survives. So do the commercials for Cats at the Winter Garden Theatre that interrupted my after-school cartoons on WPIX 11.

I never saw the show.

Couldn’t have told you much about it if you asked me.

But I knew the song.

Memory (1981) seemed to be everywhere in the 1980s. You heard it on the radio, in television specials, and in the background of popular culture often enough that it eventually took up permanent residence in your head whether you invited it in or not.

One verse in particular stayed with me.

Touch me

It’s so easy to leave me

All alone with the memory

Of my days in the sun

Think about it for a second.

It’s a moment where everyone has already decided the characters best days are behind her.

A crowd that has already made up its mind.

Sound familiar?

Today, everyone keeps saying product management is dead. Someone posts it. People agree. The whole thing gets shared around and two weeks later someone else writes the same thing with a different headline.

But here we are.

And it’s not the first time someone has declared something dead.

Every few years a new tool arrives and someone writes the obituary. Agile was going to kill product management. No-code was going to make it irrelevant. I’ve been reading some version of this piece for most of my career.

Now it’s AI’s turn.

Here is the thing though. When the power drill arrived nobody held a funeral for the screwdriver. They just picked up the drill because it was better at that particular job and got on with everything else that still needed doing. The carpenter did not become obsolete. They just stopped using the screwdriver for jobs the drill handled better.

AI writing a PRD in thirty seconds is the drill.

That’s it. That’s the whole story.

The document was never where the thinking lived anyway. It was what you had left over after someone sat in a room with real stakes and competing priorities and made a call. The call was always the job. The document was just the evidence that a call had been made.

That part has no prompt. It never did.

Nobody wants to say this but product management let this happen.

The role drifted. Slowly and quietly until one day the roadmap was the job. The sprint ceremony was the job. The PRD was the job. And the actual work nobody could easily point to in a meeting stopped being anyone’s priority.

I get why it happened. Documents feel productive. You can show them to people. You can put them in a folder. Nobody can easily tell you whether the decision inside the document was right or wrong. Not until six months later when the numbers tell the story you were hoping they wouldn’t.

Shipping features is not the job. Delivering strategic value for the business is the job. Those are not the same thing and I have watched teams confuse them more times than I can count.

It never looks like failure at the start. The dashboard declares victory. Leadership wants to double down. The quarterly story writes itself.

But then support tickets quietly rise. Sales calls start including the word workaround. Customers in interviews don’t sound angry. They sound tired. Churn hasn’t spiked yet but it will. It always does. Just never right away.

The spreadsheet says success. The room says celebrate. The PM slows it down anyway.

That is the work. The part a prompt does not catch and never will.

Strategy does not shape itself. Someone has to do that.

I have sat in enough rooms to know that the obvious answer is usually wrong. Not always. But often enough that you learn to slow down when everyone in the room is nodding.

AI will summarize everything you give it. It will generate options that look reasonable. It will produce something that feels like a plan.

But at some point someone has to decide. And that decision comes from somewhere a prompt cannot reach. Years of being wrong. Years of watching the obvious answer turn into an expensive lesson six months later.

And when that call is wrong someone still has to sit in a Steering Committee review and explain it. That has never been the machine’s job. It has always been yours.

The eulogists were never watching the actual work.

They saw the meetings. The documents. The roadmap reviews. And when AI learned to generate those things in seconds they assumed the role had been replaced.

It is an overly confident conclusion for people who could never quite explain what the role was doing when it was supposedly alive.

Somewhere out there, someone is writing another obituary for product management.

They were probably writing it before they finished their coffee this morning.

That’s fine.

The rest of us have work to do.

Focusing on the strategy that shapes the business. Using our understanding of the business problems people want our products to solve.

The days in the sun were never behind us.

They were never even here yet.

And personally, I’m tired of reading the obituary.

Let the memory live again.

A new day has begun.