what is PM?

• people who glue creative ideas to the engineers

PM has different jobs at different stages of a startup

1. product market fit

Here, founders experiment rapidly to find what sticks with customers.

1. post product market fit

Here, experimentation stops. Stop commuincation between teams and focus 100% on that product. You MUST meet customer expectations.

1. hypergrowth

PM manages the organizations’ scale, and has 2 goals:

• scale product to more users
• expand to adjacent product lines

1. late stage

PMS fight innovators dilemma, by creating zero to one products with large corporate structure

the shift from info mover to product builder

Information movement is handled by AI agents (the forward deployed engineer is dying as a result).

• Middle managers will also die since they can’t reinvent themselves.

the modern PM’s value lies in judgement, decision-making, and having a strong opinion on what should be built and why.

• He argues this role is a lot more interesting

Merging roles (PMs, designers, and engineers)

• Modern product people are expected to be gritty and technical, often using AI tools to build and validate their ideas directly rather than just managing others who build them

• it becomes less about people management and more about system design. you need to decide what to build

career advice

Your tech career is 40-50 years, averaging 15-18 jobs YOUR GOAL: each job should build on the other. SO, ensure first role maximizes opportunities for the second

Now PMs are expected to be technical:

• You should leave a company to be part of one that grows faster than you
• You shouldn’t be the best in your company

how to get a job as a college student?

Be modern

• Use latest tools (AI agents, claud code)
• Have opinion on what NEEDS to be BUILT
• IMPLEMENT stuff. Be hands on over learning theory

Learn beyond programming

• keep a systems mindset ( As knowledge becomes a service and AI handles more of the construction, the primary problem becomes: “Does it fit, should you build it, and how do you know if it’s working?” )

This skill involves:

• Understanding how different stacks work and evolve
• Evaluating if a project aligns with a company’s brand or system design
• Thinking about where a product fits into the broader technological landscape

Succeed in unstructured places

• thrive without structure and feedback (there are less managers)
• Maintain an Undying Urgency to ship and experiment

building a talent agency

Skip.show: A website featuring content and a Substack focused on product leadership Skip Coach: help tech professionals stay current regarding how AI is changing company building - Practitioners vs. Learners: He distinguishes between people “practicing the craft” and those “learning the craft.” He argues that once a community scales and prioritizes monetization, it tends to attract learners, causing elite operators at the top of their game to leave - He only keeps 120 people in this group, because they have limited time - AI will kill off the ‘career development’ agency led by humans

random advice

Value customer needs over what is ‘most valuable’ to your perspective. For example nobody wanted 1 app to do all messaging (Google hangouts). Whatsapp purely focused on text messages.

It doesn’t matter how you start but how fast you improve it (speed of iteration)

Why large companies fail?

• they are symptoms of scale, and culture.
  1. they constantly place massive bets on products to keep growing infinitely
  2. sunk cost fallacy
  3. culture dictates product strategy. Google: highly reactive, iterative fast and pull back fast if something fails Meta/Apple: founder driven. you can’t achieve greatness by agreement within a company. Zuck forced himself into metaverse, but it wasn’t the worst thing ever