The trick is: when.
Not always.
And hardly at all in “yolo mode”.
If you are the backbone of any major LLM it is.
If you are the PM for building AI products, you better dang know how to use AI productivity products.
The era of MBB and process driven PMs is dead. We are back to the pre-2013 era of PMs as domain experts first and foremost.
As an ex-PM, thank goodness.
Process oriented PMs are useless. Process is a tool, not a product competency. UNDERSTANDING who a customer is and the problem they are facing is what matters.
We build products and companies in order solve a problem, not the other way around. PMs and Founders with this mindset tend to succeed from an investment standpoint.
This is especially prominent in much more technical products like AI/ML, Cybersecurity, Data Lakes, etc.
If you are building and selling a technical product to technical personas, you better understand the pain points which only comes from having actually experienced that.
Eventually, a solid CSM should be able to hear a customer pain point, spit out a quick POC, and begin a segmented rollout to validate it as quickly as possible.
Also agree with suspicion around this post though… big tech interviews, especially in AI adjacent roles, are going to be structured well enough that this probably wasn’t actually a surprise. I’d much more believe the reverse: “I was told I would have a technical/vibe coding component and didn’t!” (much less exciting headline of course)
PMs who started before 2012 or after 2022 tend to have a product mindset ("I'm building a product to solve a problem").
This requires domain experience - you can't learn this from an MBA. You need to have started of working in that field in order to become a truly strong product manager. Before the 2010s, most MBA PMs tended to be staff or principal engineers, sales engineers, or support engineers sponsored by their employer to attend part-time MBA programs like Berkeley Haas [0] or Stanford HCP MS&E [1]as a finishing school and return as a business minded engineer.
Google and Twitter (back under Dorsey in 2010-11) changed the whole PM hiring process industry wide by prioritizing MBB personas and MBB-style interviews as one of their heads of PM at the time was a former Partner at McKinsey and brought the McK process into the tech industry, despite more product minded people like Salar, Marissa, and Sundar helping build core fundamentals of what became the Google behemoth (Xooglers, please correct me if the history is wrong - it's been 15 years and I do think I messed up some of the chronology).
[0] - https://ewmba.haas.berkeley.edu/
[1] - https://msande.stanford.edu/academics-admissions/graduate/ms...
Nay. I found education, healthcare, and other industries that are not tech focused to be much more rewarding. You are the expert in those industries and are given a chance to lead.
I build ML for healthcare orgs. Different things. An immunology prize needed a model to filter out applicants because they were overloaded. A nurse staffing agency wanted to measure burnout in nurses using the data they had. A speech therapy provider. A school district. And on and on.
I'd rather work for them than bend the knee to Tesla's Technoking.
Actually, there's a rumor that if you punch the world's richest man in the face, his wealth rubs off on you. You will spend some time in jail, but you will be rewarded. Make sure they catch it on camera.
> Instead, I jumped into building my Langchain backend agent first and completely messed up the code for tool calling in Langchain.
Vibe coding involves the agent existing before you start.
I currently run a set of docker containers for proxy, backed, frontend, and authserv, and the best I've got is "edit" mode in vscode...and while it probably 2-3x my output, it maybe 0.8x my quality, and 0.5x my understanding/scalability.
The interviewer is an idiot.
The whole point of vibe coding is you are asking for what you want and the AI gives it to you. If you don’t get what you want, there are a bunch of reasons why that could be, but many of them are only available in hindsight.
ChrisMarshallNY•6mo ago
Sign of the times, I guess...
ls-a•6mo ago
Kapura•6mo ago
PradeetPatel•6mo ago
Right now it appears that most industry leaders have fully committed to AI. It would be foolish (career wise) to speak openly otherwise.
ls-a•6mo ago
tkiolp4•6mo ago
earleybird•6mo ago
moomoo11•6mo ago
Honestly, the biggest mistake IMHO was hiring non technical product managers and putting them in charge of technical teams. They’re almost always annoying af, useless, and tbh “people skills” only go so far because it’s mostly a systems problem that communication falls apart.
Having worked at successful tech companies (that IPO’d), I have never met a non-technical product manager who was any good or worth remembering.
The best thing happening in tech right now IMO are the layoffs affecting PMs and other "manager" types. We all know they add very low value because their actual role is "scapegoat" when their projects fail (mostly due to them in the first place). It is also why they were almost always the only ones fired prior to AI revolution.