My new product manager is not who you think

I have a new product manager.

It isn’t who you think. Or maybe it is.

My new product manager would have been Claude, if Claude was smart enough to be my product manager. But it isn’t.

My new product manager is the already-existing product manager who uses Claude.

That distinction is the whole essay.

The challenge isn’t just who can write tickets, or who can manage a roadmap. The challenge is that this person also has to be the custodian of the product vision. And that’s why being a product manager is no longer enough.

What building looks like right now

If you have an idea, and you can write a clear PRD — what success looks like, what the functional requirements are, what the non-functional requirements are — you can get that app built in a day with the right AI tools. Maybe in hours. The day is me factoring in reviews.

One person with five custom-made AI agents can build almost anything, if the pipeline is right. Linear. Slack. GitHub. Claude Code. ChatGPT. MCP. The whole system.

So my product manager has to be someone close enough to understand the product vision. But that person isn’t going to look like the product manager we know today.

They need to understand what the customer wants. They need the bandwidth to do a complete user test on every freaking new feature. They need to be able to talk to Claude about the codebase.

Traditionally, product managers didn’t need to be close to the code. Now they do.

Product managers need to know where the codebase is. They need a GitHub account. They need access to Google Analytics, Segment, Mixpanel, and every other place where the product is quietly telling the truth. They need to be in direct conversation with stakeholders. They need to be in the sales calls. They need access to the meeting notes. They need to know what customers are saying before the roadmap becomes a museum of old assumptions.

The PM as decision maker

The product manager today is the person who can decide where the product is going.

They can make a hard pivot today. They can say “this is what we’re doing now,” and the entire product motion changes around it.

When a feature ships from the design and engineering team — aka me and five other agents — the product manager is going to vet it. Test it. Document their expectation from the new feature that shipped six hours ago.

While that’s happening, they’re also in three or four sales calls with the BD team. They’re tracking user behavior. They’re reading analytics. They’re synthesizing feedback. They’re turning chaos into the next thing we should build.

To make this concrete: I ship two different builds every six hours. That means the product manager is supposed to tell me what I’m working on tomorrow.

Today, I can get my agent to synthesize all the feedback and ship. Then have the agent synthesize the next round of feedback and ship again. By the time I wake up tomorrow, my product manager should already have something new for me to cover as basis. Because they just synthesized customer feedback. They just ironed out a workflow. They just had a call with a potential customer. They found something that needs to be reviewed.

The PM also uses Claude

Here’s the thing. The product manager isn’t going to manually write everything I need to do.

They’re going to use Claude. They’re going to use ChatGPT. And not inside a cute chatbot window. I mean a fully integrated workflow. Agentic ChatGPT with Dispatch or Remote Control. Claude Code. Claude CoWork. MCP. CLI. Connected tools.

Their work isn’t just planning. Their work is using MCP to read Google Analytics. Using MCP or the CLI to read GitHub. Finding out what I just pushed across all the codebases. Synthesizing design — because we no longer have to design only in Figma. A lot of that can now happen in Pencil.

While that’s happening, the product manager is joining calls with stakeholders, connecting Granola to those calls, giving Claude all the context it needs from Granola, and breaking down what I need to do next in order to move forward.

So when the product manager gives me a new breakdown, it’s fully contextual. All I have to do is move. Write the code. Verify the code works. Run the tests. Run the security suites. Ship.

The Holy Trinity

In a way, it almost feels like the product manager could build the entire thing.

But in the real world, the scalable pattern is simpler. One product manager. One super-talented engineer. That might be everything you need to ship world-class products.

Teams are going to transition toward this. One product manager and one super-talented engineer become the core product unit. Outbound is left for the people who run outbound. The face of the company becomes the person doing TikTok, marketing, videos, dev rel, community, storytelling, distribution.

So a company today can be three people.

One product manager, who is really an operator. One engineer, who is really a full-stack, end-to-end builder. One face of the brand, who goes out there, talks to people, creates content, drives engagement, and brings everything back into the business.

That’s the new Holy Trinity. Product operator. Engineer. Distribution.

I don’t buy the one-person billion-dollar business idea. But I can buy the three-person billion-dollar business.