Nothing Fundamentally Changes in Product Management — Even With AI

The fundamentals of product management aren’t changing — not now, not next year, and likely not anytime soon. If you think AI changes what product management is, my apologies to say this, but you probably never really understood what it has been all along (or maybe throughout your career).

To clearly explain this, let's go back — or rather, more accurately, look at the very foundation of product management, which eventually leads us to the understanding of a business.

Because product management, stripped of all the titles, frameworks and tools, is really about one thing: understanding how a business creates value and helping it create more of it. Everything else we associate with the role — roadmaps, user stories, prioritisation frameworks, stakeholder management — are simply mechanisms to support that objective. When people lose sight of this, they start confusing the tools used to do the work with the work itself.

Understanding Business

Business? Oxford refers to it as: the activity of making, buying, selling, or supplying goods or services for money.

The year was 2016. I was sitting with an acquaintance of a friend, someone I had just met for the first time in my life. Schlumberger was wrapping up some of their operations in Nigeria and looking to close the Port Harcourt office. As a result, a lot of office equipment was going to be sold off.

This acquaintance had some “connection” on the inside and we were waiting to get the go-ahead to purchase some of these items at a very discounted price. So we waited under the hot afternoon sun, sitting in a nearby shop, chatting away and eating bole and fish.

At some point during the conversation, the acquaintance said something that has stuck with me through most of my adult life:

Buying and selling is the oldest and most surviving trick in the world. Once you understand that, a lot of things start to make sense.

If you strip most things down to their barest minimum, that's essentially what is happening — buying and selling. It’s a constant thread running through trade, markets, companies, careers and by extension, even our lives.

Whether you think back to trade-by-barter days or something more modern like getting paid at the end of every month, the principle remains the same: one party is selling and the other is buying.

For the context of this conversation, let's stay with careers and salaries.

When companies — who run businesses — pay employees at the end of the month, it's because those employees have sold their time, skills, and thinking to deliver services for the business. Now, here is the crucial part we often forget: these companies expect to make multiples of what they pay employees.

In very practical terms, somewhere in finance there is a number attached to each employee — whether in financial modelling tool like Anaplan or a spreadsheet — representing what value that role is expected to generate relative to its cost.

Don't take it personally, in most businesses, money is simply the most visible expression of value. However, value can show up in different ways depending on how a company defines success.

How Businesses Define Value

Now, a bit of nuance is important here before we connect this back to product management.

As the world has evolved, so have businesses and their different approaches to defining value. For the big companies — think Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce — the conversation often revolves around stakeholder value. For many companies just below that tier, the language usually shows up in slides from finance: ARR, CAGR, EBITDA. There are also organisations, like non-profits, where value is defined through impact. But even there, resources still need to be deployed and sustained.

In essence, the definition of value might vary, but the core idea remains the same: value must be created.

The Role of the Product Person

This is where the role of the product person becomes important. The job of this individual in any business is fundamentally to:

• Understand what value means for the business
• Help the business achieve that value
• In some cases, help the business identify the next big bets

There is a reason I'm intentionally not using any fancy product title here. It doesn't really matter what this person is called — product manager, co-founder, CEO, evangelist, or something else entirely, but this function must exist inside every business.

More importantly, whoever performs it will always be focused on those three things.

Tools vs Work

Now, to get that work done, people rely on tools, frameworks, and different approaches, but that’s all they are: tools.

And this is where an important distinction needs to be made between:

Product management (or whatever you want to call it) and The tools used to get the work done.

As always, history seems to be repeating itself. We've seen this trap before — where we overemphasize and over-optimize for the tools used to do the work instead of understanding the actual work that needs to be done.

Think back five years ago when almost every bootcamp or intro to product course spent most of its time teaching people how to use the latest project management tool, how to write the perfect user story, or how to apply every framework in the book.

Now ask yourself: how different is that from today?

Almost every product influencer seems to be predicting the death of product management, how AI is going to redefine the role, and how product people must now learn to build or manage agents. I understand why these conversations are happening. Influencing is both a means of livelihood and a way to stay relevant, but it’s important to point something out;

If you don’t understand why you need to build an agent, or what value it brings to the business — something you can only understand if you know what value means for the business in the first place — then you've fallen into the exact same trap as before.

You’ve simply replaced learning how to create a new Jira project with learning how to create an AI workflow.

Different tools. Same misunderstanding.

Simply put, if you think learning the tools is what the job is about, then you probably never really understood what the job was in the first place.

Just like every project management tool eventually converged, AI tools will likely do the same. The difference this time is that you will probably get the benefit of getting things done faster, but faster doesn't automatically mean better. If you don't understand the actual work that needs to be done, all you are really doing is the wrong things — faster.

This isn't an argument against learning new tools. By all means, use whatever helps you get the job done. Just don't lose sight of what the job actually is.

So no, nothing fundamental is changing in product management. The tools we use to get work done will continue to evolve, but the core remains the same: understand what value means for the business and help create it.