Why half of product managers are in trouble | Nikhyl Singhal (Meta, Google)
TL;DR
The old PM who mainly moved information is becoming obsolete — Nikhyl Singhal says roughly half of PMs are in trouble because the role is shifting from PRDs, status reports, and alignment theater toward builders with judgment who can ship and automate work themselves.
AI is creating a weird split: layoffs and booming opportunity at the same time — he predicts the next 12–24 months will bring “massive shedding” and then rehiring, with examples like a company cutting 30,000 people and hiring back 8,000 AI-first workers.
The best PMs now look more like product builders than coordinators — Singhal argues the winning skill is judgment: deciding what to build, whether a change is actually good, and how to preserve a coherent system as testing gets 10x–100x cheaper and faster.
The fastest path to surviving this shift is to find a small moment of joy building with AI — whether it’s a chief-of-staff app, a matching tool, or a personal side project, he sees people flip from fear to momentum once they build something useful with Claude, Codex, or similar tools.
Brand-name logos matter less than how current you are — instead of rewarding resumes from Meta or Google on autopilot, companies increasingly ask scenario-based questions about tools, judgment, and how you build in this new AI-native operating model.
This is brutal, but not forever — Singhal compares today’s chaos to an industry-level reset similar to the early internet PM transition, arguing that the next couple years will be messy, exhausting, and high-pressure before a new stable product operating system emerges.
The Breakdown
PMs are finally having more fun — and also melting down
Singhal opens with a sharp contrast: three years ago, many PMs spent their days moving information up and down org charts with “responsibility without authority,” which he calls one of the worst forms of workplace stress. Now, the best product people are having fun again because they can build directly, test ideas faster, and feel a closer connection between instinct and customer impact — but the tradeoff is constant alertness, fatigue, and a sense that the rules keep changing every three months.
A San Francisco meetup made the future feel very real
He describes a gathering of 125 heads of product where people demoed internal AI tools they’d built for productivity, and the vibe was basically joyful one-upmanship: “your chief of staff does that, my chief of staff does this.” What struck him wasn’t just the enthusiasm — it was that the language around prioritization, product decisions, and information flow already felt like “a completely foreign animal” compared with even 12 months earlier.
Judgment becomes the job as software gets easier to change
Singhal says product leaders will increasingly be paid for judgment while software, AI, and agents obsolete the mechanical parts of product work. As the cost of testing drops and companies can make 10x to 100x more changes, PMs matter less as coordinators and more as people who can decide what should exist, what fits the system, and whether a change is actually worth shipping. He even predicts a world with “no more bad software,” using his own terrible smart-home apps and legacy systems like United’s MileagePlus and COBOL-heavy mainframes as examples of stuff AI could finally clean up.
The labor market is splitting into builders and everyone else
Even with PM openings at a three-year high, Singhal thinks the market has redefined what counts as a product manager. In his framing, the “information mover” is becoming a dinosaur, while builders — whether they come from product, engineering, design, or marketing — are the ones everyone wants. His blunt version: if you got into tech because PM was lucrative and you liked communication and team-building but don’t actually love building things, “you’re in trouble.”
Why so many smart people still aren’t adapting
The most powerful part of the conversation is psychological: Singhal argues people resist reinvention because they thought they’d already done the deal — school, hard work, brand-name company, manager title, good income. Now, right in their “power years,” when they’re juggling kids, aging parents, health, and work, they’re being told to reinvent on a moving target, and that’s why even strong performers freeze.
The antidote is finding one moment of joy with AI
His practical advice is not “be more technical” in the abstract; it’s to build one useful thing and feel that click. He’s seen people go from anxious to energized after making a simple app for their partner, inbox, house, or workflow, and says that moment of joy is what gets them across the chasm from fear to momentum. His own stack is mostly Claude lately, and he uses it to automate community matching, recruiting workflows, and content systems with the core philosophy that a great builder should constantly try to obsolete their own work.
Drop the ego, increase pace, and think in skip moves
For the next two years, he says, people need “fire in the belly,” more pace, and less attachment to title, seniority, or level. He urges PMs to be willing to go more hands-on, take smaller roles if needed, and optimize for staying modern rather than preserving status, because the long game is getting onto the boat headed toward the new operating model.
Product skills are spilling into every function
Singhal is bullish that PMs who can talk, judge, and drive change will spread into founder roles, C-level jobs, and even functions like HR; he mentions one senior product person interviewing for a CHRO role and notes his community grew from one founder to 14 in a year. He closes on a cautiously optimistic note: this is “smiling exhaustion,” not just exhaustion — brutal pace, yes, but also real energy for people who cross the threshold and start building.