ChatPRD

As of today I feel like well-prompted AI has better product sense than ~70% of the builders out there.

I’ve seen this floating around, most people ick-ing at this as Claude derangement syndrome. But guess what! This CEO probably just wants to get great outcomes fast, and I’d bet he’s thrilled to hear something other than “it’s not a priority” or “let me revise this and we’ll come back next week” or “thanks for the input but we have experts on the team.” Maybe your team isn’t producing work up to their standards. Maybe your company is slumping along at single digit or negative growth and the board has said it’s up or out. Maybe he’s trying to drive up AI adoption. Maybe the CEO job sucks and AI makes it more fun. Maybe AI raises the floor and the ceiling on everything. I will say I’d rather a CEO who cares about driving up quality of marketing copy than one that’s checked out. I’d rather be lead by a Claude Boi than an exec team that forms a “AI innovation committee” and is just starting their limited 2 quarter trial of copilot. I’d rather just have the answer handy “yep, we did deep research on this via ChatGPT and figured out how to automate brand assets consistently thought nano banana, do you have any feedback?” SLOP ENGINES BEWARE for sure, but I generally think folks don’t have enough insight into how corporate anxieties and power dynamics make the exec job a lonely one, and I’m not surprised CEOs are reaching for tools that shorten feedback cycles, openly brainstorm, and produces work (not more meetings.) Look. Do I think there are better styles of leadership? For sure. Do I think that means some teams don’t need a major wake-up call? No. Ok have fun. Tell Claude hi.

I’m not gonna bet against Claude Code, but there is a very important lesson in product competition going on right now, and it’s this: The features ≠ the Product

12 careers that will dominate the next 10 years: 1. AI/ML Engineer 2. Data Scientist 3. Cybersecurity Specialist 4. AI Product Manager 5. Robotics Engineer 6. Cloud Solutions Architect 7. AI automation specialist 8. Marketer 9. Technician 10. UX/UI Designer 11. AR/VR Developer 12. Blockchain Developer

Question: Given that all PMs will eventually have access to the same AI tools, how do I differentiate myself as a product manager? I get this question a lot. And I don't love the shallow answer going around that "all that matters is taste." Taste is definitely important, but here's my far more concrete playbook for differentiating as a PM in the age of AI: 1. Stay at the frontier of AI fluency - I think too many people are dismissing this one saying that "everyone is going to have access to the same tools." But I'm a year and a half into this and I can tell you the gap is only widening on folks who can wield AI well in their job vs those that can't. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. So the people best positioned are the ones that know how to use AI effectively to produce great output, which is no easy task. 2. Taste / high standards / judgment - This is the one everyone talks about and I agree it's important. For example, I recently showed off 13 AI PM skills I built in Claude Code. What I didn't show was the 16 others that I tried to build but ultimately threw away because the output didn't meet my bar. I'm seeing lots of other people ship these skills and just accept the low quality output coming out of them. This is a mistake. The first battle is knowing what great product work looks like. The second battle is continuing to hold yourself to that standard. Don't ship slop. 3. Domain expertise - As the functional aspects of the role become more commoditized, I do think domain expertise in a given field becomes even more important. I don't think it's a fluke that a cardiologist beat experienced software developers in Anthropic's recent vibe coding contest. It's because his deep knowledge in the domain allowed him to come up with such a compelling solution to the post-visit patient problem that he deeply understood. Only a domain expert could do that. 4. Product strategy - AI is terrible at product strategy. I've tried every which way and it never comes up with a compelling, differentiated product strategy that has any chance of winning the market. I think that's going to be the case for awhile. So it's a great area to continue to build your muscle. 5. Design - The advancements coming out of Gemini, etc is impressive, but I still can't get AI to match the world-class designers I've worked with in my career. Especially on interaction design, not just visual design. Learning these skills is still valuable.