Adapt or die

We're in the middle of mass extinction event in tech - again

Darwin described it like this: new, better-adapted forms of life emerge through natural selection, and the less-adapted ones go extinct.

That's what's happening now. AI-native companies are growing faster than ever with fewer people, and their work looks completely different from how it looked just 12 months ago.

Product people

Let's focus on product people, since that's been my line of work for years.What do product people fundamentally do?

• Decide. They make sure the right decisions get made.
• Coordinate. They align people so they can work together efficiently.
• Drive results. They're responsible for making the product a business success.

None of that is changing. We still need judgment about which problems matter and which trade-offs are right. We still need to coordinate humans (and, increasingly, agents) and make sure things ship. And we still need someone who owns the outcome, good and bad. What's changed is how we do those things.

The new species

With this much intelligence at our fingertips, we can do more work, and better work.

More

The obvious win is speed. Instead of writing tickets and code, we now direct and edit. That means one person can cover far more ground. Scope that used to be split across two or three product people, or experiments that needed an engineer and a designer, can now be handled by a single product builder. Beyond taking on more product scope, I've personally picked up marketing and ops work too.

Better

Speed is only half the story. The quality bar should go up too, even if it hasn't everywhere yet. You can prototype full flows with real interactions. You can go deep on data analysis. You can have a handful of agents review your PRDs so you never miss an edge case. We can simply do better work.

The edges

Change never moves at the same speed everywhere. It starts at the edges: AI-native startups eating the lunch of traditional tech companies, and AI-native PMs inside those companies outcompeting their peers, not by being 10% better, but by being 10x better.

Keep evolving

Here's the thing about evolution: it doesn't stop. The frontier in tech is always moving, and today's AI-native way of working will be tomorrow's baseline. Adapting once isn't enough. The people who thrive will be the ones who stay curious, keep experimenting with new tools and ways of working, and are willing to let go of habits that served them well last year.

This extinction event is happening right now. But it's also the most exciting time ever to work in tech. We have leverage and tools previous generations could only dream of. The only question is whether we keep adapting.