Edi Sipka: My take on the future of product management in the age of AI

Published in May 2026 in Medium’s Bootcamp publication, this essay by Edi Sipka takes on the question that most product managers are now asking quietly: if AI can handle the operational work, what is the role actually for?

Sipka’s argument is that product management historically became defined by coordination — writing specs, running meetings, managing stakeholders — and that this layer of work is now largely automatable. Documentation, summaries, wireframes, and initial prototypes that once took days now take minutes. The question he raises is not whether this displacement is happening but what it reveals about where the real value was all along.

His answer is that the best product managers were never primarily valued for the artifacts they produced but for their ability to understand customers deeply and identify the right problems to work on. AI does not make this skill less important — it amplifies it, because the gap between a poor product decision and a fast one is now measured in hours rather than weeks.

One of the more concrete observations in the essay concerns the speed of consequences. When execution becomes faster, bad decisions also become faster. PMs who used to have time to catch and correct a wrong direction during a lengthy development cycle will have less runway. This shifts the emphasis toward getting the initial framing right rather than iterating out of a poor foundation.

Sipka also notes that traditional role separation between product, design, and engineering is dissolving as AI lowers the friction between disciplines. The emerging profile he describes is less of a process manager and more of a systems thinker — someone who can combine product intuition with enough technical and creative range to operate across the blurred boundaries.

The essay is short and takes a position rather than offering a structured framework. It is most useful for product managers reflecting on what kind of work to prioritize as AI absorbs more of the coordination layer, and for those thinking through what skills to develop versus which ones to rely on AI to handle.