Artificial Intelligence is no longer a future threat, it’s today’s reality. From prioritising backlogs to driving customer research, AI is reshaping the very basis of product management.
But is AI killing the product manager role or reinventing it?
At dualoop, we believe the answer is clear: product management isn’t dying. It’s evolving. Those who adapt will shape the future of innovation. Those who don’t risk being left behind.
We spoke with Marv Gillibrand, Head of Product at Colibri Digital and former McKinsey leader, about how AI is changing the foundations of product work. His take? The PM role isn't disappearing, but it's being stripped back to what actually matters.
This article explores how AI is transforming the PM role, what critical skills will define tomorrow’s product leaders, and how to build a resilient, high-impact product career in the age of AI.
AI in product management
Let’s get this out of the way: AI isn’t coming. It’s already here, reshaping the way teams prioritise, research, and ship. And product managers? You’re right in the blast zone.
AI isn’t eliminating product management, it’s exposing its weaknesses.
If your value is writing Jira tickets and summarising delivery status, the future looks rough. But if you’re already obsessed at solving the right problem and leading teams strategically, you’re not obsolete. You’re more essential than ever.
What AI is already changing
From product owners to product thinkers
The traditional “Product Owner” model (where success is measured by outputs, ticket completion, and velocity) is already obsolete.
The future belongs to Product Thinkers: strategic leaders who focus relentlessly on outcomes over outputs.
Here’s the shift that’s underway
It’s not about working harder, it’s about working smarter, focusing energy where human creativity matters most. You need to think like a founder.
What AI changes (and what it doesn’t)
What AI will take off your plate:
- Writing boilerplate user stories
- Generating release notes
- Sorting interview transcripts
- Drafting early prototypes
What AI can’t touch (and you should insist on)
- Making judgment calls when the data isn’t clear
- Understanding context, nuance, and edge cases
- Building trust with teams and execs
- Crafting product narratives people can rally behind
“AI handles the small brain work. Humans must dominate the big brain work .” Marv Gillibrand, Head of Product @ Colibri Digital
4 types of PM work
If your calendar is full but your impact isn’t great, it’s time to review the way you work. You can use this lens:
Skills that actually matter
These are the four competencies that’ll separate PMs who survive from those who lead:
1. Strategic thinking
Tomorrow’s PMs must deeply understand market trends, customer needs, and company strategy.
They will no longer manage tasks; they will shape missions and align cross-functional teams around the why. They won’t just ask “what should we build?”, they’ll ask “why now, and what happens if we don’t?”
2. AI Fluency
PMs don’t need to become machine learning engineers and build models.
But they must:
- Understand the basics of AI models, biases, and capabilities
- Challenge AI-driven outputs
- Know how to prompt them well
- Know when not to trust them
It’s AI fluency, not coding expertise, that will separate great PMs from good ones.
3. Discovery mastery
AI can summarise interviews and surface patterns, but it cannot replace empathetic, hypothesis-driven discovery.
PMs should invest even more heavily in customer conversations, structured experiments, and insight synthesis. They’ll need:
- Real conversations
- Hypothesis framing
- Interpretation (emotions, verbal and non-verbal patterns) and contextualisation (inferred context)
4. Creative and ethical leadership
AI can generate ideas, and it’s fast but not wise. Only humans can:
- Use AI to spark ideas
- Evaluate the potential of those ideas
- Anticipate ethical issues and societal impact
- Make bold bets and decisions
What about the future of product management?
It’s easy to view AI as a threat. It’s harder to see it as an amplifier of our potential. What’s great? The boring parts of the job are going away. That’s good news!
"Being a product owner has become an anti-pattern. Typing into Jira isn’t the job. Thinking critically, solving real problems, that’s where humans lead." - Timoté Geimer
Done right, AI will allow you to:
- Spend less time writing tickets,
- Spend more time finding opportunities and shaping leading strategies.
- Become an orchestrator and outcome creator rather than an output coordinators
- Move faster and smarter, guiding the product narrative
“AI didn’t kill the product manager. It killed the backlog manager.” — Marv Gillibrand
The age of AI is not the end of product management, it’s the end of bad product management.
What to do next
The question isn’t whether AI will change the PM role: it already has.
The real question is: will you evolve into a product thinker, or become another casualty of automation?
Here’s how to start levelling up right now:
🤔 Decide on the product leader you want to be
🧠 Audit your calendar tomorrow
- How much is admin vs. shaping?
- Pick one thing to automate
- One thing to kill
- One thing to amplify
🧠 Run a “product work reset” workshop
🤖 Block 1 hour a week to build AI fluency
🎙️ Share AI experiment with leadership
At dualoop, we help product teams and leaders make this leap every day, aligning strategy, discovery, delivery, and leadership so you don’t just adapt to the future, you shape it.
Are you ready?
