For twenty-five years, agile has turned PM into a meeting management role / software dev janitor. Now AI is pulling us back to what matters - the only thing that matters - JUDGMENT!
Today’s reading…
Chamath says agile has broken your company
The “Product Owner” role that was supposed to represent the customer became a bureaucratic proxy. A layer between engineers and business outcomes, distorting requirements at every handoff.
- Yes, ok, Chamath is selling a product, but I think he is more right than he is wrong. I’m here for it. (https://www.8090.ai/)
- He argues that agile turned “responding to change” into an excuse to never finish anything. “Velocity” replaced quality — story points, burn-down charts, throughput, none of which measure whether the software is any good. YES.
- Sadly, PMs participated in this demise and over the last decade, have become little ticket soliders. Or waiters. Lots and lots of waiters delivering little tickets to dev. We’ve lost the plot and it’s time to get back to fundamentals.
The most underrated hire right now
“The story matters as much as the thing. Internally, it organizes the team around a shared model of why. Externally, it shapes the interpretive frame users bring to their first experience. You can’t retrofit narrative onto a product and expect it to land — it has to be load bearing from the start.” signüll
- signüll makes the case for a new role: not a PM (spoiler alert: it’s a PM), but a “product thinker.” Someone with an intuitive grasp of where the product is soft, where it sings, and how to move it.
- The argument: building is no longer hard. Engineering is no longer the bottleneck. Variance in outcomes has shifted almost entirely to judgment — what to build, how to sequence it, how to tell the story.
- I love the phrase “load bearing” - that describes it completely. It has to be real from the start.
Figma CEO Dylan Field on taste
“If an agent can do it for you, an agent can do it for someone else.”
- When execution becomes free, execution becomes worthless. What remains is taste. The one thing an agent can’t generate.
- The new job isn’t building — it’s selecting. Sample the widest possible space. Then be harsh enough to reject everything until something’s worth keeping.
- We’re all saying the same thing.
Max Levchin on the jobs argument
“AI means fewer software jobs is totally backwards.”
- He argues - most companies in the S&P500 would build their own software if they had the talent.
- With AI, it means great engineers can be great engineers and great PMs can be great PMs.
- My take is - those lousy at either can do something else, and in the next year or two it’s going to get uncomfortable for PMs that are not learning or re-learning the fundamentals. The return of the MRD is upon us.