good judgement is the limiting factor and we need product managers more than ever
My own struggle with this sentiment—as a product manager, no less! -- is that this implies that good judgment sits squarely in the product manager’s domain and that somehow this excuses designers or engineers from exercising good judgment.
I can accept the idea that good judgment is an aspect of product management, insofar as a key function of product management is improving decision quality, but product management is an activity that doesn’t have to be bound to a specific role or individual, just as writing code doesn’t have to be bound to the software engineer role.
Product management as a skill-that-improves-decision-quality certainly won’t go away, and I agree with you that good judgment will be more important than ever as execution gets cheaper and cheaper. But what a product manager looks like as an individual who is paid to be a product manager will either probably cease to exist soon or look at least vastly different because I just don’t think there’s defensible ROI in the typical day-to-day outputs of the role anymore.
My own struggle with this sentiment—as a product manager, no less! -- is that this implies that good judgment sits squarely in the product manager’s domain and that somehow this excuses designers or engineers from exercising good judgment.
I can accept the idea that good judgment is an aspect of product management, insofar as a key function of product management is improving decision quality, but product management is an activity that doesn’t have to be bound to a specific role or individual, just as writing code doesn’t have to be bound to the software engineer role.
Product management as a skill-that-improves-decision-quality certainly won’t go away, and I agree with you that good judgment will be more important than ever as execution gets cheaper and cheaper. But what a product manager looks like as an individual who is paid to be a product manager will either probably cease to exist soon or look at least vastly different because I just don’t think there’s defensible ROI in the typical day-to-day outputs of the role anymore.