Adapt or die

We’re in the middle of a mass extinction event in tech.

To speak with Darwin: New “improved" forms of life emerging through natural selection, leading to the extinction of “less-improved” forms.

New AI-native companies are growing faster than ever, with fewer people. A team of 20 is now a team of 5 plus tokens. What is this new species?

Product people

Let us focus on product people - my line of work for the past years.

What are the fundamental things product people do?

• Decide: They are responsible the right decision gets made.
• Coordinate: They are aligning people so they can work together efficiently
• Drive results: They are responsible for making the product a business success.

These fundamentals aren’t changing:

• We still need judgment, which problems matter? Which trade-offs are the right ones?
• We still need to coordinate humans and agents, and make sure things ship
• We still need to drive results, and have someone to point at when things go south.

What changed is how we achieve those things.

The new product species

We have so much knowledge and processing power at our fingertips now. This means we can do more. And we can do things better.

More

The obvious wins are around speed. A PRD that used to take two days of writing, debating, and circling back on edge cases? That’s now a 1 hour session with Claude. Backlogs maintenance is a solved issue with Linear CLI. You have a team of agents that can help you with strategy and execution. We’re just directing and editing.

Because all of this is faster, you can cover more ground. Scope that would have been split across 2-3 people before. This can be either more product-scope, or running marketing and operations too.

Better

Speed is only half the story. The bar for quality has gone up too. You can now prototype full flows and real interactions. You can go deep on data analysis. You can have a bunch of agents review your PRDs so you never miss an edge case. You get the point. You need to execute at a higher level.

Adapt or die

Innovation never happens at the same speed across all lanes: It is starting with at the edges, where nimble AI-first startups eat the lunch of more traditional tech companies. Where AI-first PMs inside those tech companies eat the lunch of their peers stuck in their old ways.

This extinction event is happening right now. But at the same time, it is the most exciting time ever to work in tech. You have leverage and tools that previous generations could only dream of. The choice is yours: Adapt or die