In 2015, engineers were the bottleneck.
In 2025, they’re not even close.
AI coding tools — Claude Code, Cursor, Devin, Copilot Workspace, take your pick — have quietly rewritten the speed curve. What used to take a week of engineering time now takes an afternoon. What used to take an afternoon takes an hour. And what used to take an hour…well, now you can generate it between meetings if you can write a decent prompt.
But there’s a side effect almost no one is talking about:
When code becomes cheap, clarity becomes expensive.
And clarity lives inside Product.
We are in the early stages of a generational shift where:
- Product skills are becoming dramatically more valuable.
- People outside of Product are being forced to learn Product thinking.
- And because anyone can “ship something” now, everyone is suddenly a PM — whether they realize it or not.
The companies that recognize this early will move 10x faster than their peers.
The companies that don’t will drown in half-built features, conflicting requests, and AI-generated chaos.
Let’s unpack it.
1. Product Managers Are Quietly Becoming the Fastest-Growing Job in Tech
Look at job postings over the last 18 months: PM roles have grown ~3x faster than the average tech role since Claude Code launched.
Why? Simple:
- Companies suddenly have engineering capacity they’ve never had.
- But they don’t have the clarity, prioritization, or customer insight to use that capacity.
- So they scramble to hire PMs — the people who turn messy inputs into buildable outputs.
Engineering speed doesn’t create clarity.
It exposes the lack of it.
Every AI-coding-powered organization hits the same realization:
“Our engineers are flying. Our roadmap isn’t.”
So they add PMs. Then more PMs. Then PM-Ops. Then Product Analysts. Then Product Operations Analysts.
And the cycle continues because the bottleneck has moved permanently.
2. Product Skills Are No Longer Restricted to “Product People”
Here’s the second-order effect that most teams haven’t internalized:
PM skills are spreading across the org like wildfire.
Today’s sellers?
They’re expected to translate customer problems into product requests.
Today’s CS reps?
Expected to articulate customer workflows, edge cases, and pain points.
Today’s executives?
Expected to make roadmap tradeoffs with the precision of a PM.
Today’s engineers?
Expected to think in terms of user outcomes, not just “tickets completed.”
The number of employees who do product work is 5–10x the number who have product titles.
That was fine when engineering was the bottleneck.
You could afford messy requirements, scattered feedback, ambiguous specs, and tribal knowledge.
Not anymore.
When engineers move fast, ambiguity becomes lethal.
3. If Anyone Can Code Something, Everyone Becomes a Product Manager
This is the big one.
AI didn’t just accelerate coding.
It democratized it.
A salesperson can prototype a workflow.
A CS rep can build a small tool.
A founder can ship a feature without bothering anyone.
A marketer can generate a new interface.
An executive can “just test something” and send it to the team.
Shipping no longer requires engineering.
But shipping the right thing still does.
So what happens?
Teams start generating features and experiments faster than Product can evaluate them.
Internal “shadow roadmaps” multiply.
Every function becomes a mini-product team — uncoordinated, under-informed, and operating on instinct.
In other words:
When everyone can code, everyone becomes a PM. Most just don’t know the basics.
Product literacy becomes as fundamental as spreadsheet literacy was in the 90s.
And companies that embrace this?
They get an organization where every function makes better product decisions, faster.
Companies that don’t?
They get chaos disguised as momentum.
4. This Is a Generational Shift — And the Market Is About to Respond
Think about the implications:
- Engineering is accelerating.
- Product literacy is becoming universal.
- PM roles are multiplying.
- Every department is producing product inputs.
- Companies are overwhelmed with customer and internal data.
- And the bottleneck is now the product process itself.
This is the definition of a seismic market shift — the sort that creates entirely new software categories.
Just like CRM became mandatory when sales complexity exploded…
Just like marketing automation emerged when content volume exploded…
A new category is forming around Product Intelligence, Product Alignment, and Product Ops Automation — tools that help teams:
- make sense of customer feedback,
- turn it into clear product decisions,
- coordinate cross-functionally,
- and ship the right thing faster.
Companies that adopt these systems early will outpace everyone else because they’ll be the only ones that can consistently answer:
- What do customers actually need?
- What should we build next?
- Why?
- Who asked for it?
- What is the cost of not building it?
- And how fast can we ship it?
AI makes engineering fast.
These systems make building the right thing fast.
Both are required.
5. The Winners Will Be the Companies That Recognize the Opportunity Now
If you’re a CEO, this is your moment.
The companies that move fastest on this shift will win entire markets because:
- they’ll ship higher-quality product faster,
- they’ll be more aligned internally,
- they’ll know exactly what their customers want,
- and they’ll stop wasting engineering cycles.
And the companies building software for this — the platforms that sit across Product, Sales, CS, Engineering, and Leadership — will define the next decade of enterprise SaaS.
This isn’t a “PM tools” wave.
It’s a transformation in how companies build.
AI is changing the shape of organizations.
Clarity, prioritization, and product thinking are now the limiting reagents.
If AI made engineers 10x faster…
Product needs to become 10x smarter.
And it will.