The Era of the Product Creator

I have been emphasizing that the heart of the product manager job is product creation.

The job is not about being a facilitator or cheerleader, it’s not about being a project manager, and it’s definitely not about being a backlog administrator.

Rather, the necessary role of a product manager is a product creator, working alongside the product designer and engineers every day to solve problems for our customers in ways our customers love, yet work for the business.

Specifically, the product manager contributes to product discovery by taking responsibility for the value and viability of the solutions we discover and deliver.

Further, I have been sounding the alarm about those people in a product manager role that are not actual product creators. I’m not saying that what these non-creators do is not useful. But I am suggesting that they are missing the real point of their role, and that they are increasingly and especially vulnerable with the rise of generative AI.

But my purpose in this article is not to repeat the warnings to non-creator product managers.

Instead, what I’d like to do is highlight what I consider a profound shift occurring in our industry, and that is the rise of others in serving the role of the strong product manager in product creation.

With the rise of generative AI-based tools, and a growing understanding of the essential role of product sense, and that this sense is something you can develop and are not just born with, we’re seeing strong designers and engineers starting to play this role, as well as people from beyond the product team – founders, product leaders, and business stakeholders.

Of course, we have always had cases where strong designers, strong engineers or strong product leaders play the product role, and many examples where a startup founder plays the product role¹. But in the past, these were more the exceptions; the people that had real passion for the vision, along with a broad range of knowledge and skills to help make that vision a reality.

But the new generation of tools are empowering a much broader set of people to take on this role, and I believe this represents a fundamental shift.

While I did not predict that the enabling tools would develop so quickly in this direction, these have always been the very same people that I have tried to encourage to pursue a career in product.

I am personally very excited to welcome these aspiring product creators, and to try to enable and empower as many of them as possible to be successful.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that we rename product managers to product creators. Rather, anyone actively shaping the product and tackling the product risks (value, usability, feasibility and viability) is a product creator. Their title doesn’t really matter.

Also, please understand that I am not suggesting that there will be only a single product creator on most products. There will be some people that succeed alone, but I believe they will be the rare exceptions. Most serious products will need a range of skillsets, even with very talented people using the best tools. The more I talk to teams building actual AI-powered products and services, the more this seems clear to me.

So what I am expecting is that over the coming years, we will see a very clear delineation in who plays the product creator role.

Those high-agency product managers that have understood that they are responsible for value and viability, and all that entails, are ideally suited for the AI-powered future (and you can already see the market rewarding these people with rapidly increasing salaries). Similarly for those product designers, engineering leads, and entrepreneurs that have the burning desire to create something new, and solve real problems for people and companies.

If I’m right, the coming wave of innovation will be unprecedented.

Unfortunately I expect the non-creator product managers to be left behind. Jobs that may have made sense in another era, but no longer. I feel for the people that will have their lives disrupted, and I will continue to try to help upskill as many as possible, but my focus will remain on the product creators of the world.

There is an especially long and proud history of strong product managers becoming startup founders. ↩︎

The Era of the Product Creator

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