There's a paper OpenAI published last month that I keep thinking about. It's about how the entire product delivery lifecycle is changing — not just the coding part, but everything around it.
The first point is why AI making coding faster doesn't actually make products ship faster. Turns out coding was never really the bottleneck. According to research they cite, coding is about 8% of the work it actually takes to ship something. The other 92% is everything around it. The requests sitting in a queue waiting for someone to look at them, the PRD reviews, the sprint ceremonies, the approval committees. All the waiting rooms.
And AI is sunsetting these. Which got me thinking about what that means for PMs. And honestly, for a lot of roles in the software product lifecycle.
The PM whose primary job is converting a business request into stories and tickets, grooming a backlog, coordinating with a scrum master... I don't know how that survives. Not because those people aren't good at what they do, but because agents are going to do it in minutes. Same with business analysts, scrum masters, delivery managers, release managers, QA coordinators. Anyone whose job was mostly managing handoffs between humans. That whole coordination layer gets weird fast.
What I'm less sure about is what replaces it.
The paper calls out a role most companies don't have yet. Someone who actually owns the AI doing the work. Not the AI strategy. The AI doing the work. Are the outputs good? Is it drifting? What can it run on its own and what still needs a human? They call it an Agent Manager. It sounds a lot like product management, just for AI systems instead of human teams.
I think the PMs who figure this out are the ones who get curious about how the tools actually work. Which coding agent to use and when. How an agent uses context. Why it hallucinates on certain inputs. Which integrations matter and which are hype.
The paper ends with "it's a leadership problem before it's a technology problem." Sure, I can agree with that. But it's also an individual and rather personal problem if you're in one of these roles and waiting to see how it plays out.