I’ve been using[1]ClaudeCode extensively since December and I actually have sort of the opposite view: That good judgement is the limiting factor and we need product managers more than ever. Several of the apps I’ve been working on have features that I don’t plan to implement because I don’t feel like thinking through how to make them make sense. I have a lot more of these examples but they’re for a recipe app I haven’t made public yet: The code is fairly trivial since it’s very AI-based and almost every issue is blocked by deciding how the feature should actually work[2].
At this point, software engineering skill is definitely necessary for some things (algorithms, high-level design), but I’d say probably 90% of this was implemented with a prompt that just tells Claude what I want and and doesn’t say how to do it.
This app is up to 1,300 commits and v1 is done. The only remaining work I’m interested in is an offline mode (hard for React-y reasons), improving content extraction (needs a lot of work that Claude would have trouble with on its own, and the brute-force method of using an LLM is too expensive), and making Android/iOS apps.
For example, the app automatically creates volume/weight conversions but people typically mix weights for things like flour with volumes for things like vanilla extract, but also sometimes you really do want every ingredient including vanilla extract to be a weight if you’re making a huge batch
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.
I’ve been using[1] Claude Code extensively since December and I actually have sort of the opposite view: That good judgement is the limiting factor and we need product managers more than ever. Several of the apps I’ve been working on have features that I don’t plan to implement because I don’t feel like thinking through how to make them make sense. I have a lot more of these examples but they’re for a recipe app I haven’t made public yet: The code is fairly trivial since it’s very AI-based and almost every issue is blocked by deciding how the feature should actually work[2].
At this point, software engineering skill is definitely necessary for some things (algorithms, high-level design), but I’d say probably 90% of this was implemented with a prompt that just tells Claude what I want and and doesn’t say how to do it.
This app is up to 1,300 commits and v1 is done. The only remaining work I’m interested in is an offline mode (hard for React-y reasons), improving content extraction (needs a lot of work that Claude would have trouble with on its own, and the brute-force method of using an LLM is too expensive), and making Android/iOS apps.
For example, the app automatically creates volume/weight conversions but people typically mix weights for things like flour with volumes for things like vanilla extract, but also sometimes you really do want every ingredient including vanilla extract to be a weight if you’re making a huge batch
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.