Navigating the Changing Role of the PM

Welcome and Introductions

Cynthia Petti & Rina Alexin | 00:00:00 – 00:04:45

Hello. Hello, everyone. Welcome. We have an exciting webinar today: Navigating the Changing Role of PM, or product managers. As you settle in and come in, please share where you’re located, your name, your location. If you want to share whether you’re a fellow product manager or in a different role, you can type that in as well. We are from all over.

I’m here with Rina. I’m Cynthia, by the way, everyone. Hello.

As Cynthia was saying, we’re just going to wait another minute for people to join. I always like to remind people that it becomes a lot easier to ask the questions that really matter if you start out by talking and saying just anything. So we want to invite you to post your name, your location — maybe even, as Cynthia suggested, if you’re in product or moving into product or thinking about it or have been a product leader for many years. We would love to hear a little bit more about who’s joining us today.

Cynthia Petti | 00:02:00 – 00:03:10

Hey, Clint from Kansas City — imagine the weather’s nice right now. All right, so welcome everyone. We’re going to go ahead and get started. We have this amazing topic today — Navigating the Changing Role of PM — and I am Cynthia, COO at Productside. Rina is going to be sharing so much knowledge about this topic. And with that, Rina, I want to invite you to say a little bit about yourself.

Rina Alexin | 00:03:10 – 00:04:45

Hi, everyone. My name is Rina Alexin. I’m the CEO of Productside, residing right now in Austin, Texas. As Cynthia was saying, normally she’s sitting right next to me here in Austin. I’ve been with the company now — Productside, for many of you who know, we used to be called 280 Group — we’ve been around for over 25 years, and I’ve been at the helm here for the past eight years. I’ve really enjoyed positioning us as more than just a training partner, but a transformation partner. Cynthia, why don’t you maybe quickly introduce a little bit about what you do at Productside as well?

About Productside

Cynthia Petti | 00:04:45 – 00:08:30

Thanks, Rina. So I’m Cynthia Petti. I’m the COO at Productside, and I’ve been here through what Rina called 280 Group. I do a little bit of everything. One of the cool things is that I get to step out and wear several hats, which includes engaging all of you on this webinar — not my day-to-day. So you might hear me say some ums and trip over my words, but please be patient because I promise you, you’re going to get some excellent learning material today.

We know how hard it can be to deliver products people not only use but truly love. We’ve seen it all. We are outcome-driven. We are your product partner. We don’t just provide the solutions — we tailor them to everyone’s unique challenges. These are complete solutions for transformation from strategy to execution, and we’re with you every step of the way.

At Productside, we offer:

• Tailored expertise — your challenges are unique and so are the solutions
• Complete solutions for transformation from strategy to execution
• Invested experts who are an extension of your team
• An obsession with your success at every step

And again, thanks so much for joining. The number one question we get: will you get a recording? The answer is absolutely yes — every single one of you is going to get a recording. So if you have to drop off, don’t worry, we’ll get this to you. Please use the chat. The more engagement, the more questions, the more value every single one of you is going to get from this learning.

We also believe in community. We value our product managers and building that community on LinkedIn. You can scan the QR code to join — you get best practices, you hear from other product managers and product leaders who are in the trenches with you, and we always learn from each other.

Why We Are Here: The Ground Has Shifted

Rina Alexin | 00:08:30 – 00:10:24

Wonderful. Thanks, Cynthia. And thanks everyone for joining. I see some familiar names — Sarah Boon, hi. And Joe Goaly — it’s so nice to see some familiar names and some new ones.

Why are we here today? We’re here because the job description we wrote four years ago — and even maybe two years ago — doesn’t match the role we have today. A few years ago, the job of product management, I wouldn’t say was very clear — role clarity is one of the most common issues we see across all organizations. But we kind of understood it:

• We owned the backlog
• We wrote requirements
• We ran standups

Fundamentally, many product managers felt that they just got a handle on how they could really succeed in their career. And then the ground moved. AI showed up. Engineering is no longer the bottleneck. The clean handoffs — if they were clean — between product, design, and engineering all started to blur. And the market got loud very fast.

How many of us see every day on LinkedIn:

• “PM is dead”
• “Learn this tool”
• “Here are my 10 stacks of Claude skills you must use today”

It’s quite something. But what do we do? We do what we always do — we try our best to understand where the signal is from the noise. We read articles. We watch YouTube. We attend webinars like this. And even that can be confusing because there’s just so much noise — even more noise with AI also helping generate content.

So that is my goal today: to try to articulate some of the shifts we’re genuinely seeing that product leaders and product managers are actually struggling with, and to make sense of them. We’re going to talk about the role, what has changed and what hasn’t changed. And once you start to see these shifts clearly, my hope is that the noise gets quiet — that you’ll have a filter to really sort things out for yourself.

Poll: How Are You Responding to the AI Shift?

Cynthia Petti & Rina Alexin | 00:10:24 – 00:13:30

So I want to start by asking the first poll. Can we get the poll kicked off? Cynthia, do you want to go over this?

So we have here: which response to the AI shift sounds more like you right now?

• Waiting it out — it feels like hype
• Want to engage but don’t know where to start
• Experimenting, but it’s scattered with no real system
• Adopting it fast — and you’ve stopped asking “should we” and only ask “can we”

I’m honestly so happy that none of you are waiting it out. Above 95% of product managers are using AI in some way, shape, or form. But this experimenting — not feeling like you really know where it truly belongs — I hear that over and over in my conversations with product leaders and at executive dinners. It’s true that most people are in that third bucket, and I see it reflected here.

So that’s the point — what you’re feeling is real. And our goal at Productside is to try to articulate that. As many product people love, we’re going to use a good 2×2 today to try to make sense of it all. We’re going to give you four major shifts that you can name, really understand, and maybe even plan around. Once you see these shifts, you won’t be able to unsee them. You’ll start spotting them in your own team — and if you’re looking for jobs, maybe even in the job posts you read.

The Four Shifts: Internal and External

Rina Alexin | 00:13:30 – 00:20:00

Let’s get started. What are the four shifts? The 2×2 we’re going to use is essentially around internal and external.

Internal shifts are about:

• How you create value with people, tools, and stakeholders
• The way product is getting built
• Where most thought leaders on LinkedIn are spending their energy

External shifts are about:

• How you create value for the people you serve
• Your customer, your market, the business outcomes you’re trying to generate
• Where the bar is actually rising the most

A few years ago — or maybe about one year ago now — we started saying we’re heading into something called the Great Compression. That is really describing the way the roles of design, UX, engineering, and PM are starting to feel essentially merged. The clean lines are going away. There aren’t as many handoffs.

Before, as a product manager, you would:

• Do voice-of-the-customer research
• Understand requirements
• Work with design and UX teams
• Hand off to engineering — clear lanes

But now AI is collapsing a lot of those lanes. It can help you:

• Draft the PRD
• Mock up a flow
• Write the first pass of code

That’s the shift of the Great Compression: some of this work is now being taken over by another team member — AI.

But the work isn’t leaving. The question that a lot of product leaders are dealing with is: what are the new expectations? Regardless of roles and titles, there’s no longer a true need for three or four full-time employees to do the same job. Now, the caveat here is that this isn’t a smaller job — it’s actually a bigger one. But the biggest question on a lot of leaders’ minds is: what does compression look like in our organization? Because accountability has to stay with people. AI is not accountable.

I am more optimistic and bullish that there’s a lot more economic opportunity being generated — similarly to other historical shifts like the industrial revolution. This is a revolution we’re going through. It is going to create some pain for some people, I’m not arguing that. But there’s a lot of opportunity if we can articulate these shifts, know how to leverage them, and become more powerful as a result.

AI is not going to be accountable. It stops with people. So there are people in the room who will actually get a lot more power and more ownership of decisions. If you’re someone in your organization who really loves building and owning — this is a really exciting time.

Internal Shift: The System Orchestrator Role

Rina Alexin & Cynthia Petti | 00:20:00 – 00:26:30

There’s another internal shift that is really about creating systems. I like to describe it by thinking about an air traffic controller. Their job is not to fly the planes — it’s to make sure all the planes know where they’re flying and that they’re not going to hit each other. Every time that controller makes a call, all the planes and passengers feel it.

The system orchestrator role is becoming even more important for product management because:

• Product management already used to interact with just about every other role
• Great product managers and product leaders are already systems thinkers
• Organizations increasingly see product as the leader of AI transformation

If you are not currently understanding your role as a system orchestrator, that’s something to lean into — because it’s going to be extremely important as we reinvent how work happens, not just roles and titles, but how the system actually works.

So the takeaway here is: I don’t think the PM role is going away. I also don’t think it’s getting smaller. In fact, in some ways it’s getting bigger. Some of what AI is doing is removing busy work — and what’s left is something very strategic and very human-oriented:

• The decision-making
• The calls
• The insights
• The judgment

I’m very bullish on product people because there’s no other role in the organization that really knows how to marry strategic systems thinking, customer understanding, and empathy — things AI is not good at — while also not shying away from new technology.

External Shift: The New Bottlenecks

Rina Alexin | 00:26:30 – 00:28:51

Now we’re going to shift to the external point of view. What are we seeing out in the market?

Think about a busy restaurant that has solved a way to cook any meal in five minutes. Every order, five minutes. That means cooking the meal is no longer a bottleneck. But if a waiter takes 20 minutes to take an order, or 15 minutes to run it out — other bottlenecks emerge. That is what we’re seeing with AI. The bottleneck is no longer how you build.

The new bottlenecks are upstream:

• Not having really well-defined problems
• Not understanding who you’re solving those problems for
• Completely misunderstanding the jobs to be done

This is all about context gathering and running discovery. My hope is that with AI handling a lot of the execution phases, this puts more time in the product manager’s day to do much more deep discovery and research work. Because just because you can build something, or just because somebody requested it, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s valuable.

With more and more features that you can create, you can end up with:

• Significant feature bloat
• A user experience that completely suffers
• Usage that declines
• A product that won’t spread

The real way to avoid these bottlenecks is to gather context and practice great judgment. This has always been crucial. This is nothing new.

The Importance of Product Judgment in the Age of AI

Rina Alexin & Cynthia Petti | 00:28:51 – 00:37:00

So how are product people responding? There are essentially two common responses — and we’re here to talk about a third.

Response 1 — Defensive: Waiting out the hype cycle, protecting the way the job used to work. The risk: two desks over, someone else isn’t waiting. And the gap is compounding.

Response 2 — Reactive: Adopt AI everywhere, every release, every tool, ticking the box, shipping faster. But somewhere in that rush, critical questions get skipped. You might be moving fast in the wrong direction.

Response 3 — Strategic: It’s not about the tools anymore. It’s about the role — and where we should spend our time to future-proof our careers.

The bar for product judgment is only rising. The most important question in product management is becoming:

• Not “can we build it?”
• Not “how fast can we build it?”
• But “should we?”

Knowing the difference between an answer that’s right and one that just sounds right — because AI is really good at sounding right when it’s not — that is the most human and most critical part of what you do.

Practical Actions: Auditing Decisions and Practicing Judgment

Rina Alexin | 00:37:00 – 00:46:00

So let’s talk about what you can actually do. I have one assignment for product managers: audit a decision.

Pull up the last product decision that was made. Pick one that:

• Had true stakes — real money, real investment
• Had a real consequence if you got it wrong
• Was not obvious or table-stakes feature parity

Find the moment when someone asked “should we really be doing this?” — not “can we?” not “how fast?” but “should we?” If you can’t find it, maybe you missed it.

If there really aren’t any decisions you can practice with, I have a different assignment: start a decision journal. For every critical decision, record:

• The why
• The risks
• The second- and third-order consequences
• A date to review it — did you get it right?

That retrospective is the learning moment. And the “should we?” question is going to be the most important one you ask. As building becomes super cheap, you’re going to have to be asking it over and over again.

Cynthia Petti | 00:42:00 – 00:42:45

We have a question here, Rina. The organization they’re currently in really values releasing features faster than product judgment itself. So how do you advocate for yourself in that kind of organization?

Rina Alexin | 00:42:45 – 00:46:00

Let me answer directly. I think people get really confused between outputs and outcomes. If you’re being rewarded for getting things out the door, the first step is to start measuring the success. Start asking in your meetings:

• What is our actual goal with this?
• How are we going to measure it?
• Did we actually achieve that goal after we shipped?

Celebrate the output being released — but also report back the actual measurement. Showing the data in this way has people start to question: if those outputs don’t achieve anything, are we even doing the right thing? Find the measurable that people care about that they’re just assuming and not saying out loud — and actually measure it. That’s how you change the culture.

Practical Actions for Product Leaders

Rina Alexin | 00:46:00 – 00:52:32

For those already auditing decisions and tracking outcomes well — I have a bonus assignment: two hours, no AI, on your calendar. Use that time to practice one of the skills you think you’re weakest in around discovery and research. It could be:

• Booking customer interviews
• Framing a problem
• Defining the “why” behind a feature

Don’t work with AI for those two hours. Because AI is a huge leverage point — at Productside, we say it all the time: it’s an amplification. What it amplifies is your fundamental skills. If you’re really good at experimentation and discovery, you’ll be really good at understanding when that AI output is helping you instead of hurting you.

So leaders — what can you do? There are two things.

Action 1 — Audit your team’s judgment. Sit with the last decision made — with the product manager accountable for that product — and ask: did judgment show up, or was this just output? Did they think about the “why,” or did they skip it? You can’t be in every room and every decision, but you want to make sure people are actually practicing judgment — and not going faster in the wrong direction.

Action 2 — Change what you reward. If velocity and efficiency are what get celebrated, and the “why did we do this?” questions are not — it’s time to step up and fix what you reward. Product is supposed to be about achieving success for your business by solving real pain for your customers or users. Change your scorecard. If you could only do one thing this quarter, I think this is going to be the most valuable.

Q&A: Sales-Led Organizations and Product Judgment

Cynthia Petti & Rina Alexin | 00:46:30 – 00:52:32

Question:
For a sales-led organization that isn’t product-led, what can they leverage to practice product judgment when decisions are handed top-down?

Rina Alexin:
A couple of things here. One: it’s the product manager’s job to be much better informed about customers than anybody else in the room — and that includes sales. If you really understand customers, you can articulate why your roadmap is solving different problems first, because those problems show up in multiple conversations — not just specific sales conversations.

And two: most people in your organization are doing the best they can to move the business forward. Most stakeholders — including sales — are not trying to mess with your job. They’re trying to do theirs properly, and they’re not necessarily great at articulating all of their assumptions and intuition.

So when sales is influencing the roadmap, the best way to make good decisions is to:

• Go and understand the why and the expectations behind each request
• Articulate all of the assumptions that are going unstated
• Know the customer much better so you can make a case for “not now”
• Remember that sales completely underestimates how long execution actually takes

As a strategic partner, your job is to articulate all of those assumptions — and give back a clear answer to “why not now.”

The Takeaway: Let Machines Help You Stay More Human

Rina Alexin | 00:49:30 – 00:52:10

The takeaway I want you to leave with is not that people aren’t feeling they might get displaced by AI. We are truly navigating change — no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Companies are wrestling with how work gets done when we have a new partner to work with.

Let the machine take your busy work. Let it help you. Let it be a supporting team member. But take over the most human and important parts of the job:

• Let the machine take the busy work — delegate it
• Start thinking in systems and be the one in your organization designing them
• Make outputs and outcomes both visible — question the assumptions, make the risks real
• Take over the deciding, the discerning, the knowing which problems are worth solving
• Know the difference between an answer that’s right and one that just sounds right — because AI is really good at sounding right when it’s not

I do think that the product management role is going to get more human, more core to being strategic, and give more ownership to product people to deliver solutions that matter, that people will love. And that’s how all of us can future-proof our careers.

Cynthia Petti | 00:52:10 – 00:52:32

That’s a really great point. The human element of our work is not going to be lost. It is very much there and it’s very much for us to lean into.

Resources: AI Survival Kit and Upcoming Courses

Cynthia Petti & Rina Alexin | 00:52:32 – 00:56:10

One of the things we want to highlight is to get your AI Survival Kit for Product Leaders. We’ve taken the thinking off your plate — it has a lot of different prompts you can utilize. It’s geared towards product leaders, but as a product manager or someone leaning into learning and leveraging AI, I highly recommend downloading it.

This one was built for product leaders stepping into a new role or a new company. But I love to send it to just about anyone, because it actually behooves all of us as product people to audit our processes and get improvements on how we work.

And part of who we are as an organization — Productside is not only doing classes virtually, but we’re really big on doing things in person. Upcoming opportunities include:

• Chicago in August 18-20 — Optimal Product Management (3-day in-person course led by Dean Peters)
• Optimal Product Management (virtual) — live in July 14-23 and August 5-14
• AI Product Management course — coming up in July 27-30 and September 21-24
• Upcoming webinars: 5 Steps to AI Product Success featuring Rina Alexin and Kenny Kranseler on June 24 at 1PM ET.

Just a note on our Optimal Product Management class: it teaches you end-to-end product management, but AI is part of product management — which is why this class also covers how to delegate the busy work but hold on to your judgment and your decisions. It follows our blueprint, comes with a full playbook, and includes a path to the Certified Product Manager exam from AIPMM. And it’s not lecture-based — there are a lot of exercises. It’s very engaging.

Rina also has an upcoming webinar with Kenny on the AI State of Maturity Report — sharing insights and what organizations should be considering to step up in the AI game.

Q&A: AI Bubble Discussion

Cynthia Petti & Rina Alexin | 00:56:10 – 01:02:31

Question (James):
It’s a common perception that AI adoption is in a bubble. Do you agree, and do you see adoption slowing to a crawl when AI vendors pivot to being profitable?

Rina Alexin:
I don’t think it’s truly a bubble, because the outcomes of using AI are real. A couple of things to note:

• Not every use case needs the super model — organizations are learning to match the right model to the right task
• Certain models are becoming cheaper from an energy perspective as the technology matures
• Cost will go down as efficiency goes up
• Even the great models have something like a 20% false positive rate — which means trust and verify is always required

What we haven’t yet figured out as a society is the layers of how to use AI and where. It’s very expensive, and there have been a lot of case studies already done about the finance surprises — it really degrades margins if you don’t control the costs.

Internally, we use AI quite a bit — but always as a thinking partner, not to think for us. A project I’m doing right now is using Claude Code to help deduplicate our CRM and plug into HubSpot to help assess duplicates. It’s fantastic. It’s also not perfect. You have to trust and verify — and even then, the same question asked a slightly different way can produce a different answer. That’s the reality we’re all operating in right now.

Cynthia Petti | 01:01:10 – 01:01:40

And something Rina mentioned from our upcoming survey — we’re going to see people who are having difficulty with the adoption rate. There are detractors. And that’s a real part of the picture too.

Closing Remarks

Rina Alexin | 01:01:40 – 01:02:52

Absolutely. I welcome everyone to reach out if you have more questions. Find me on LinkedIn — Rina Alexin — and I’m happy to talk to anybody one-on-one as well.

Thank you so much, and thanks Cynthia for moderating with me. Thanks everyone — happy to have you here. Bye!