Sachin Rekhi: The art of product management in the age of AI

Sachin Rekhi is a product manager and angel investor who spent years at LinkedIn and has advised dozens of product teams. In 2016, he delivered a lecture at The Wharton School that became a widely shared resource in PM circles, covering what he described as the four pillars of product management: vision, strategy, design, and execution. Ten years later, on the anniversary of that original talk, he remade it from scratch to account for what AI has changed.

The 2026 version is aimed at practitioners who learned product management before AI tools became central to the work and want a clear framework for understanding what has actually shifted versus what remains fundamentally the same.

Who it’s for

The video is most useful for experienced PMs — those with three or more years in the role — who are reassessing their craft in light of AI capabilities. It also works well for new PMs who want a foundational framework and prefer to learn it with an AI-native lens rather than learning the pre-AI version first. The talk assumes no technical background.

Key takeaways

1. Vision work now includes early prototyping. AI tools make it possible to build rough but functional prototypes before committing to full specifications. Rekhi argues this changes vision work from an articulation exercise to a demonstration exercise — instead of describing what a product could be, PMs can now show a rough working version in the discovery phase.

2. Strategy research has compressed in timeline. Market analysis, competitive mapping, and strategy evaluation that previously required days of research can now be done in hours with AI assistance. The implication is that strategy work cycles faster, which means the pace of strategic updating should also increase.

3. Design iteration has shortened. AI tools can synthesize qualitative research, run interview analysis, and generate design variants quickly. Rekhi notes that this shifts the bottleneck in the design phase away from synthesis and toward judgment — deciding which direction is correct, not generating options.

4. Execution communication has improved. Meeting notes, PRD drafts, and engineering handoffs are areas where AI produces consistent, time-saving gains. Rekhi treats execution as the area where AI delivers the most immediate and least controversial value for working PMs.

5. Human taste remains the limiting factor. Despite everything AI can now do, Rekhi’s central argument is that the ability to identify what actually matters to users — what he calls “taste” — has not been automated and is becoming more valuable relative to process skills as AI handles more of the routine work. The golden age of product, in his framing, belongs to the PM who brings judgment, not the one who executes fastest.

Worth watching if

You learned product management before 2023 and want a structured way to think about which parts of your existing skills still apply and which need updating. Also worth watching if you’re new to the field and want a single talk that covers both the traditional craft and the current state of AI’s role in it.