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UX is the PM's job, and AI raises the stakes
Ravi Mehta's main example: at Tripadvisor, an icon-heavy redesign of the hotel-search filters cut conversion by 20%. He puts the potential cost of a full rollout at $100M . He rejects the idea that UX belongs only to designers. You can't take responsibility for a product's success while treating the experience as someone else's job. AI raises the stakes because teams can now bury users in "more screens, more choices, and more chat boxes" .
Three parts of his argument are practical:
- Chat is an option, not the default. A blank prompt can create translation work. Dragging an object or picking from a calendar is often easier. Hybrid designs pair language for stating what you want with familiar controls for refining the result, as in Magic Patterns and Lovable. When an agent is the user, a structured interface may be the more reliable choice .
- More automation isn't automatically better. Granola lets people take their own notes while it transcribes, then merges the two. For many customers, taking notes is part of how they think .
- How to find opportunities: watch someone do an important task and look for physical effort, cognitive burden, translation work and workarounds. Start with friction that is frequent, costly and close to the product's core value. Then count the checking and repair work a user does after the AI responds .
Building is cheap for everyone now
Hiten Shah points out that customers who used to wait six months for a feature can now build a rough version over a weekend and ask why your product can't do it. "The most threatening product feedback is going to arrive as working software" .
Sachin Rekhi, after two years of vibe coding, describes four distinct modes. For landing pages and feature prototypes he never looks at the code; prototypes work as a "modern-day Figma" for trying out different UX options. For personal apps he chooses simple, maintainable architecture. For production features at Notejoy he uses plan mode, mini-specs, explicit security and caching decisions, hundreds of unit tests and PR review. He says the last mode looks nothing like the others .
A widely discussed r/ProductManagement thread shows what happens without those guardrails. A PM said developers demand "ultra-granular" waterfall specs, skip estimates and unit tests, and leave the PM accountable for every failure . Out of desperation, the PM started building features with Claude. Third-party QA noticed better code quality, and the PM said the work finished in a tenth of the time. The PM doesn't want to be responsible for security or other things "beyond the UI" without engineering expertise .
A related post says recruiters now openly want "solution-oriented" PMs who reach features quickly . Commenters split on the cause. One says AI means PMs are expected to prototype on their own . Another says short runways make teams prefer something they can show investors over discovery .
Leadership and strategy
- Founder vs. steward. Scott Belsky argues that because models and whole layers of software are being displaced so quickly, companies whose roadmaps go from concept to execution in under a year need a founder mentality: the willingness to "churn strategy in short cycles" without fear of being wrong. He says steward leaders may suit hardware businesses with multi-year roadmaps .
- HubSpot re-founds. Brian Halligan is back as CEO. He and Dharmesh Shah say they are "completely re-founding" the company as "the Customer Harness Company" . Hiten Shah notes HubSpot is on track for $3.7B in revenue and compares the move to its original inbound playbook .
- Walmart agent profiles. CEO John Furner says Walmart will launch agent profiles in the coming weeks. Customers will be able to let their own agent or Walmart's buy for them, with limits such as a spending cap. He calls it "early in the journey" .
Talent signals
- Where UX researchers went. Lenny Rachitsky followed up on the decline in UX research roles. Of 2,779 US user researchers who changed jobs in 2024–25, 49% stayed in research, 17% moved to design, 9% left the field and about 2% became PMs. Almost half of those who stayed in research joined companies outside tech. Banks, financial firms and insurers hired about 1 in 7 .
- Hiring rules have side effects. Deb Liu argues that requiring CS degrees for PMs, which was meant to make PMs more technical, "cost us a generation of women PMs," since women earn only 1 in 5 CS degrees . That's worth keeping in mind as AI PM postings add technical requirements.
