Medium: The path to becoming an AI-augmented product manager
Artur Koter published this piece on Medium in April 2026 to address something most AI adoption guides skip: the identity adjustment a PM goes through when their role shifts away from producing work directly. Unlike most AI adoption guides that focus on tool selection, this piece is about understanding what changes when AI handles production tasks, and what the PM’s job becomes as a result.
The core model Koter introduces is an Executor-to-Orchestrator shift. In the Executor mode, PMs produce work themselves—conducting interviews, writing specs, pulling data, running competitive analysis. In the Orchestrator mode, PMs own the same outputs but guide the work rather than produce it: setting the frame, evaluating AI-generated results, and deciding what is worth acting on. Koter argues this shift is already underway regardless of whether individual PMs are choosing it, and that the PMs who adapt will be more effective rather than less.
The article walks through five specific areas: discovery, spec writing, competitive intelligence, data analysis, and stakeholder alignment. Across each one, Koter describes how the production side transfers to AI while the PM’s contribution becomes the framing, the judgment call, and the decision about what to do with the output. He is careful to distinguish between delegating work and disengaging from it—the Orchestrator role requires more clarity about goals and quality standards, not less.
The implementation advice is deliberately narrow: pick one high-friction workflow, introduce one AI tool, run it for two weeks, then evaluate before expanding. The reasoning is that trust in AI outputs needs to be earned workflow by workflow, and incremental adoption avoids the failure modes that come from reorganizing everything at once.
Most useful for mid-career PMs who are technically competent but have not yet reorganized their daily work around AI tools, and for product leads thinking about how to coach teams through this transition.