Product Management IRL: five trends reshaping PM influence in 2026
Amy Mitchell writes “Product Management IRL,” a Substack newsletter on product management from a practitioner’s perspective. This December 2025 article examines how the PM role is changing as AI reduces execution time and organizational layers thin out. Mitchell’s central argument is that PM success in 2026 depends less on scope or title and more on where influence is anchored within the organization.
She identifies five trends she expects to solidify or shift during the year.
Business growth focus
Product managers are being asked to frame decisions in financial terms — churn reduction, cost savings, revenue impact — rather than in terms of feature delivery. Mitchell argues that business outcomes are no longer downstream of product decisions; they need to be part of the initial framing. PMs who can connect product choices to metrics that matter to finance and leadership gain credibility that the product delivery framing does not provide.
Builder product managers
A growing group of PMs builds cross-functional fluency by becoming comfortable enough in engineering, GTM, and sales to ask better questions in each domain and translate between them. This is not about becoming an expert in multiple disciplines — it is about reducing the overhead of constant mediation between functions. The fluency itself becomes a source of organizational influence.
Business focus without role confusion
As PMs take on more business ownership, Mitchell identifies a risk of absorbing GTM and sales execution work that belongs to other functions. She argues that taking on that execution erodes the time available for the judgment-based work that product management actually requires. The goal is enabling other functions to operate independently, not doing their work alongside them.
AI-mediated product discovery
Products are increasingly evaluated by AI systems before they reach human buyers — through AI-powered search, procurement tools, and assistant recommendations. Mitchell raises the question of product explainability: how clearly a product communicates its purpose and value in forms that both humans and AI systems can process. APIs, product positioning, and documentation need to be accurate and machine-readable, not just clear to human readers.
Owning ambiguity
In organizations with fewer layers and less top-down coordination, PMs are expected to define local strategy and mediate between competing goals without waiting for direction. This is less a new skill than a new baseline expectation in environments where AI has accelerated execution while reducing the number of people involved in each decision.
Who it is useful for
Product managers working in organizations that are actively restructuring around AI — where headcount decisions, tool adoption, and reporting relationships are changing. Mitchell’s framing is most useful for PMs trying to understand where their role is heading rather than which specific tools to adopt. She noted that she plans to revisit these trends in mid-2026 to assess which have held up.