in a world of agents, the product role is going to split into two jobs:
- one that organizes humans (stakeholders, design, eng)
- one that organizes agents (prompts, evals, workflows, etc)
Both will be in pursuit of offering the right products to customers, but how you get there will dramatically change. What happens to the typical product rituals? Instead of PRDs, OKRs, standups, product reviews, we'll need the equivalent for agents.
Couple wild ideas here...
instead of standups:
the equivalent is that agents will report back to us based on run logs and anomaly flags. no one needs to say what they did yesterday, the system already did thousands of things. the question is where it broke, where it surprised you, and where it got better. Show us the patterns, the trends, the edge cases - particularly the ones the agents didn't fix automatically. the daily ritual becomes reviewing deltas, scanning failures, and deciding which ones matter. less reporting, more triage
instead of OKRs:
we’ll need adversarial agents that continuously monitor/grade the system and detect patterns, scoring outcomes on an hourly or daily basis. Rather than setting a quarterly goal of "increase X by 5%" and revisiting slowly -- instead, management will be able to monitor success in real-time and detect trends/patterns towards overall goals
instead of PRDs:
we won't need waterfall. Prototyping will rule the day, and we’ll need a living agentic loop that mediates customer feedback/ratings and what's being prioritized and built. you don’t hand it to eng, you deploy it into the agent loop. if it’s wrong, it fails visibly and you can revert. if it’s right, it produces the right output
instead of product reviews:
we'll need simulation systems to examine agent behavior in different scenarios. In an agentic world where UI shifts from buttons/menus to agents automatically doing things, you'll want to examine their behavior before you deploy. You rewind decisions, fork alternate paths, and see how different prompts or constraints would have changed outcomes. the review becomes interactive. less storytelling, more counterfactuals.
The PM sits in the middle of this split. On the human side, still aligning taste, risk tolerance, and strategy across people. On the agent side, shaping the actual behavior of the system through prompts, evals, and feedback loops. one side is persuasion. The other is instrumentation. the best ones will collapse the gap, translating intent directly into systems that act on it.
the fascinating part is that the agentic loop will run 10000x faster than the human one, and of course, you can "hire" them faster. Thus the “organizing humans” half starts to feel slow and lower impact unless it directly improves the agent loop. Eventually the PM will shift towards agents and maybe ignore the human coordination altogether...
you don't need to overthink this
when you look at this goldman sachs chart long enough it becomes pretty obvious how people will build the next wave of $10m-$100m+ ARR vertical ai companies
ill break it down
so we all know every business function produces something tangible
1. a recruiting pipeline produces candidate summaries
2. a finance team produces monthly reporting packages
3. a real estate team produces market analyses and listing packages
those outputs come from repeatable processes that pull information from a handful of systems and sources. builders who win in this environment start by understanding how those outputs get created today
they collect real examples, reconstruct the process step by step, then design software that gathers the inputs and assembles the finished output automatically
as adoption grows, the system expands into adjacent responsibilities until the product becomes the infrastructure that function runs on
most people still think in terms of software categories. CRM. ATS. ERP. project management. that framing misses what is happening
the next great vertical ai companies will be built around finished work. they will own the artifact the customer actually cares about, then expand outward until they own the function
so the opportunity isnt really “build an ai tool for real estate” which is what i see a lot of on twitter
the opportunity is much more specific:
1. build the ai employee that creates the broker opinion of value
2. build the ai employee that prepares the insurance renewal package
3. build the ai employee that drafts the first version of the investment memo
4. build the ai employee that assembles the lender reporting package every month
that is how small software companies become very large ones in this market
start with one painful output, automate it well, then expand until you own the workflow
basically you go from automation to ai employees
if you don't remember anything from this long post, remember that
it's obvious that this is where its all going
you dont need to overthink it
you're in the robot business now
high-agency people are rare, and once you work with them, you can’t unsee the difference.
a high-agency person doesn’t wait to be told what to do. they don’t wait for clarity, tools, permission, or a perfect plan. they step in, observe what’s broken, what’s missing, what’s needed and they start moving. even if they’re wrong at first, they move. momentum matters more than perfection.
most people aren’t born this way. agency is something you build. it starts with taking responsibility for your own day. knowing what you’re working on, why you’re working on it, and whether it’s actually helping the team. it means replacing “i can’t because…” with “i’ll figure out how.” it means caring enough to close loops without being asked.
for people who don’t have high agency yet, the fastest way to build is :
> stop waiting for instructions
> pick one problem and own it end to end
> communicate progress, not excuses
> treat the company’s problems like your own
agency grows when you put yourself in uncomfortable situations and still choose to act.
when we look for people to join our team, we don’t just look at skills. skills can be learned. agency is harder.
we look for signals people who’ve built things on their own, taken responsibility without a title, figured things out when no one was guiding them. people who don’t disappear when things get messy.
early teams don’t need passengers. they need people who can think, decide, and act. people who see problems and feel an internal responsibility to fix them. that’s what high agency looks like.
you can teach tools. you can teach process.
but agency? that comes from within.
Most introverts in PM roles spend 80% of their mental energy on thinking and 20% on communicating.
The job demands the opposite ratio.
Your best analysis stays locked in your head while less thoughtful people get credit for sharing half-baked ideas first. The frustrating part: those "half-baked" ideas often get refined through the conversation you never started.
Externalizing messy thinking feels risky. But staying quiet is riskier. Every idea you keep internal is one that never gets stress-tested, never evolves, never builds your reputation for thinking out loud.
Share earlier than feels comfortable. Be wrong more often. Your learning compounds faster when your thoughts exist outside your head.
Business Lessons I wish someone had told me at the beginning
1. Sell what is selling, not what you want to sell
2. Charge high - rich clients act and pay better
3. Never do discounts on your service
4. Never work for free (testimonial if new)
5. Ignore unsuccesful friends and family
6. Hire talented people, the chance of you fixing a loser with a sob story is highly unlikely
7. If one potential client can't afford your service, the next one will, the world is full of abundance
8. Scarcity mindset will cage your income potential
9. Copy people that have made it, your ideas probably suck, just copy what works
10. The bar is 30 feet lower than what you think it is, the bar is way lower in reality than in your mind
11. Most people suck at what they do and still get paid
12. Saturation is a myth
13. Find a niche where dumb people are getting rich
14. Choose the simple money witb low risk
15. Cash flow over evertything
16. Ignore criticisms over your business niche, no matter what niche it is people will mock it somehow, just follow the money
Let's talk about product vs services businesses and their margins.
Take Snowflake and McKinsey for example.
At Snowflake, margins are a DESIGN problem.
At McKinsey, margins are a PEOPLE problem.
Snowflake spends obscene amounts of money before revenue shows up:
engineers, infra, security, sales engineers, partner ecosystems, etc
Years of negative/thin margins are not a failure. They are the ante. Once the product works and adoption kicks in, gross margins explode.
70% or 80%, sometimes more. Every incremental dollar of revenue is mostly contribution margin.
The objective is actually quite simple: survive the burn long enough for unit economics to flip.
McKinsey lives in the opposite universe!
Margins show up early, on Day 1.
A smart team, a client, a contract. Boom. Revenue.
But margins are permanently fragile, and they never "flip". They must be defended every single year.
In consulting businesses, revenue is people-time, and (unfortunately) people-time does not scale too well.
Every dollar McKinsey earns carries a hidden tax: hiring, training, utilisation, attrition, bench, partners not selling, partners over-selling, juniors burning out.
- Miss utilisation by 5% and your margin evaporates.
- Win the wrong work and your best people quit.
- Grow too fast and quality drops.
- Grow too slow and the pyramid collapses.
Snowflake worries about cost curves.
McKinsey worries about headcount "geometry."
In product companies, margin expansion comes from eliminating humans, while in services firms, margin protection comes from extracting more from humans.
That shapes incentives in some weird ways.
Snowflake leadership obsesses over automation, self-serve onboarding, pricing models, cloud efficiency, fewer touches per $$$ of ARR. The perfect customer is one who never talks to you again after signing.
McKinsey leadership obsesses over leverage ratios, rate cards, span of control, junior-to-partner mix. The perfect engagement is one where the client feels deeply cared for… by the cheapest team possible.
This is why the 2 businesses produce different kinds of "lies" (they are nice "lies")
Product companies lie about vision.
Services firms lie about capacity.
Snowflake can promise futures it has not built yet because the upside of being early outweighs the cost of delay.
McKinsey promises attention it cannot fully deliver because saying "we are at capacity" is commercially idiotic.
In my experience, product executives underestimate how HARD HARD HARD services are.
On the other side, consultants often romanticise product margins without understanding the burn and the years of red ink these people need to suffer.
One business is a bet on scale eventually saving you, the other is a fight to stop entropy every quarter.
Confuse the 2, and you design incentives that will destroy the company...
One of the most important things I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older is that most things don’t matter.
Whatever you’re trying to accomplish, there are usually just a couple of things on that to-do list that will actually make a difference.
And I’m not saying the rest of the items on your list shouldn’t get done…I’m just saying they probably don’t need to be done well.
There are two big benefits of taking this perspective.
First, it means you can relax. So much of our daily stress comes from the feeling that we’re leaving things undone, or not doing them well, or that we “didn’t put in that extra 10%.”
If you start from the assumption that not much really matters, you can let most things be imperfect.
Second, it allows you to focus a disproportionate amount of time on the one or two things that do matter.
Triage is such an underrated skill.
But if you can correctly determine which one or two things will—if you get them right—make the difference between success and failure, then you can spend your time taking those to a high level of polish rather than wasting your time on everything else.
It’s a power curve.
let me share some hot takes about managing constant priority shifts:
1. You cannot stop the priority chaos. Full stop. Anyone selling you a framework that eliminates it is lying. What you can do is make the tradeoffs visible and force leadership to own them.
2. Stack ranking is the single most powerful weapon against priority whiplash. Show current priorities with resources allocated, expected outcomes, and timelines. When the new shiny thing comes in, pull up the stack rank and ask "what drops?"
3. Most PMs absorb the chaos instead of reflecting it back. Your job is clarity, not shock absorption. If priorities are shifting weekly, that's information your leadership needs to see, not something you quietly manage around.
4. "New work in = old work out" should be a non-negotiable rule. Every time someone adds something, something else has to come off. No exceptions. The moment you accept "just squeeze this in" you've lost.
5. Anchor every conversation to outcomes, not tasks. "We're deprioritizing the dashboard redesign" gets pushback. "We're choosing to delay our retention improvement goal by 6 weeks" gets a real decision.
6. Some chaos is organizational dysfunction you cannot fix. Politics, competing exec agendas, lack of strategy clarity. Recognize when you're trying to solve a PM problem that's actually a leadership vacuum.
7. Technical dependencies make "just be agile" advice useless sometimes. When your backend team is mid-migration and you need their work to ship anything, no amount of prioritization frameworks helps. You wait.
8. Being obsessively organized is a survival skill, not a personality quirk. The PM who can pull up any project's status, dependencies, and blockers in 30 seconds is the one who survives priority chaos.
9. Data and facts help with pushback but not everyone appreciates it. Some stakeholders just want to hear yes. Know which battles require evidence and which require relationship capital.
10. The PMs who handle priority shifts best have stopped trying to predict them. They build systems that assume priorities will change monthly, and they're never surprised when it happens.