Hiring a PO to keep the backlog and sit between the business and the developers? You're optimizing a circuit that is already obsolete. This piece takes apart the split between those who think the product and those who execute it: why it degrades quality, why a backlog cannot ground a profession, and why AI removes the last excuse for living with it.
AI raises the capacity to produce — not the capacity to decide. Developers move up toward product, PMs move down toward construction. This shift blurs roles without dissolving responsibilities. A full account of what AI commoditizes in product management, what remains hard, and a catalog of emerging roles with their real risks.
Shipping code faster doesn't help if nobody understands what got built. AI automates exactly the tasks that used to train junior developers, and a delayed error stops teaching anything once the system has grown too complex. A few concrete anchors for staying in control: clear contracts between APIs, tests tied to actual behavior, rebuildability as a quality bar instead of raw delivery speed.
Your tools file information away just fine, but they don't capitalize on what it teaches you. This piece explains why the future of the information system isn't a better AI-filled form, but a shift toward contexts: portable, governed units of memory that can link sources, decisions, and reasoning instead of merely storing them.
Certain product decisions come up everywhere: in roadmap reviews, with sales, in specs, with every big client. Without a record, the company keeps re-deciding them, often with less context. The PDR — inspired by technical ADRs — documents these cross-cutting decision rules. Rare, short, immutable: it doesn't say what to build, it says why the company chose a rule. It removes dozens of pointless discussions.
You leave a meeting with an action plan, yet nothing has truly been settled. This is what I call a soft decision: a non-decision dressed up as consensus. Organizations often prefer it to a genuine judgment call because it preserves the appearance of agreement without making the loss visible. This piece explores why the mechanism is rational in the short term, and why it costs so much at the execution stage.
Your teams leave the meeting aligned—and each walks away with a different version of the decision. The problem isn't a lack of meetings, it's the absence of shared objects. Glossary, one-pager, PR/FAQ, ranked metrics, decision log, escalation rules: these tools don't produce alignment, they force disagreements to become visible before they turn costly.