Why half of product managers are in trouble | Nikhyl Singhal (Meta, Google)
Direct counter and nuance to last week's Rabois 'PM role is dying' claim. Nikhyl Singhal — runs Skip Community, ex-Meta/Google/Credit Karma — says: yes, the information-mover PM is dying. But the judgment-driven, builder PM is in a renaissance. The most open PM roles globally in 3+ years. Compensation at all-time highs for the top tier. Forecast: companies will shed 30,000 and hire 8,000, but the 8,000 will be AI-native.
Key points
- Two PMs in two roles. The 'information mover' PM (frame this for boss, frame that for boss's boss, responsibility-without-authority) is being obsoleted in real time. The 'builder + judge' PM — who can ship, test, prioritise, evaluate — is in the best market in years.
- Job-market data point: globally, the most open PM roles in 3+ years. The market hasn't collapsed; the role description has flipped.
- Forecast for the next 12-24 months: 'massive shedding and massive rehiring. A company might shed 30,000 and hire 8,000, but the 8,000 are AI-first.' Net headcount way down, productivity way up, comp at the top tier way up.
- What's changing in the day: PM judgment becomes the scarce resource. AI takes over scheduling, doc-writing, summarisation, status-tracking, and increasingly the prioritisation analysis. What's left is decisions about what to build and whether what got built is good.
- 10-100x more product changes will land per cycle because the cost of testing collapses. This makes good judgment more, not less, valuable — every shipped change carries brand, security, and maintainability implications you can't auto-validate.
- Bold prediction: 'In two years there won't be any more bad software.' Reasoning: every neglected app gets fed to Claude/Codex and rebuilt. Lower bug count, more secure, more consistent. The long tail of the App Store gets pruned by automation.
- Mid-career stress is at a historical high. Power years (mid-30s) collide with health declines + ageing parents + family demands + a job that changes weekly. The real psychic load isn't loss of role; it's the velocity of role change against finite human bandwidth.
- What product leaders are doing differently in the wins: building agents and chief-of-staff apps for themselves. 'Joyful one-upping' at the Skip Community meetups — show and tell of personal AI tooling.
- Counter-direction in language: '12 months ago we didn't have words for what we're doing today. 12 months from now will be similarly unrecognisable.'
- Practical: 'feed the LLM at night.' The new PM-evening discipline is working with models, not turning them off. The stress is wishing for more time to do this, not less.
- Implicit pushback on Rabois: 'PM role makes no sense' is true for the role-as-it-was. Reborn as a judgment-and-build role, the top tier has more compensation and more leverage than ever — and more PM roles open than at any time in 3 years.
Notable quotes
The information mover is essentially going to become a dinosaur.
We have the most open PM roles globally in three plus years. This is a complete renaissance for the product industry — but it comes with a lot of strings attached.
A company might shed 30,000 and hire 8,000, but the 8,000 are going to all be AI-first.
The builders are going to have the time of their lives. But if you don't love building stuff, you're in trouble.
There's so much joy in the audience that people were like, 'oh I've been building this thing, let me show you.' Everyone had their laptop and they were one-upping each other.
Themes
- The renaissance of the builder-PM and the death of the information-mover
- Mid-career velocity stress as the new burnout
- 10-100x product-change frequency and the rising value of judgment
- Counter and nuance to Rabois on the PM role