Keith Rabois: prediction

Transcript context

…I want to get your take on the future of specifically the product triad. You work with a lot of product people, engineers, designers. Everyone's always wondering, what the hell is going to happen in my career? Thoughts on just the future of those three specific roles? Well, I saw this podcast or I listened to this podcast that Peter Fenn did. And he convinced me that the idea of a PM makes no sense basically in the future. If you think about decomposing the logic is what does PM usually do? They take these inputs from customers, they create this sequential roadmap that's well organized over the next year, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That world is ridiculous. Right now, the capabilities of foundation models or companies like Lovable and things like that are just so improving such a rapid rate that it makes no sense to have a year-long roadmap. And they're just incoherent. There are things that were impossible to do in November that are actually pretty easy to do right now in March. And so I think you need to build an organization that's incredibly adept at, people say nimble and all that stuff, but incredibly adept at changing the roadmap almost on the fly. And I think intermediaries like conventional PMs don't make a lot of sense versus being prepared intellectually, embracing and exploding, noticing. So someone needs to notice that, "Oh, wow, we can actually do this." But then exploiting it this week is the future of a high growth stellar startup. We'll notice that something's now possible this week and create new features and new value for customers next week. That's such an interesting area of discussion. A lot of people listening to this RPM. So I want to try to defend that role just to see if I can convince you otherwise. And by the way, I will say Mark Andreessen had this really good visual of just what's happening here is all those three functions, it's like the standoff where they're all like, "I'm good taking... The future is my role. The future is design, that's engineering is the future." So the way I see it is as AI makes it easier to build and eats the middle of the software development process, just anyone can build detailed AI, here's what I want. The hard part, the gap at least for now is figuring out what to build and then aligning everyone around what to build.…

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