When Engineering Speeds Up, PMs Can’t Be the Bottleneck
Some tips to keep your team moving forward
A few weeks ago, Andrew Ng made a provocative point: AI has made coding so fast that the real bottleneck in tech isn’t engineering anymore—it’s product management.
That line stuck with me, because I’ve felt this shift happening firsthand. We used to complain that engineering timelines slowed everything down. Now, with AI copilots, libraries, and frameworks doing the heavy lifting, teams can spin up features and experiments faster than ever. The constraint has moved upstream. Suddenly, the question isn’t “How fast can we build it?” but “Can product figure out what to build, and why, at the pace engineering can now deliver?”
This is a reckoning for product managers. And it’s going to separate those who thrive from those who fall behind.
Why PMs Have to Step Up Now
I’ve always believed that good product managers aren’t measured by the quality of their specs or their ability to run Jira boards. They’re measured by their ability to make great decisions with imperfect information—and to do it fast enough to keep their team moving. That’s more important now than ever.
Here’s where strong PMs can double down:
1. Leverage Customer Insights Relentlessly
When engineering is no longer the bottleneck, the quality of your insights becomes the real advantage. At Rewarder, I remember shipping a feature in record time that we were sure customers would love—only to discover it tanked adoption because we hadn’t done enough discovery upfront. The cost wasn’t in engineering hours (we shipped it in a week), but in opportunity cost. We burned time we could have spent on something valuable. We had a different approach at Zenly, when we launched voice to text, something many others hadn’t nailed at the time, we relentlessly shipped and tested with customers until we knew the quality bar was high and that the feature was delightful. Without key customer insight and feedback loops, we wouldn’t have been able to launch such a successful feature.
Good PMs need to be obsessive about talking to customers, watching analytics, and triangulating data from different sources. That means moving beyond “What feature should we build?” to “What underlying customer pain are we solving, and how will we know quickly if we’re right?”
2. Make Faster Decisions With Limited Data
This is where experience really matters. Senior PMs who have lived through multiple product cycles, pivots, and failures can often spot patterns faster. I’ve seen it play out: a senior PM hears one customer story and immediately connects it to a broader funnel drop-off they’ve seen before, or recognizes that a proposed feature is just another flavor of a failed experiment from five years back.
For younger PMs, this is tough. If you haven’t been through the battles, you don’t yet have the pattern-matching muscles. But that doesn’t mean you’re doomed—it means you need to accelerate your learning. Shadow senior PMs, study failed experiments, and build your mental library of “what works/what doesn’t” as quickly as possible. Your engineers won’t wait around for you to catch up.
Also, become an expert on the latest tools and fail fast. Start doing rapid prototyping leverage LLMs and gain skills that your senior colleagues may take longer to adopt. This can become an unfair advantage for junior and more adaptable people to quickly get up to speeed and become effective product managers.
3. Don’t Hide Behind Technical Complexity
For years, one of the hardest parts of being a PM was keeping up with the technical stack—understanding APIs, databases, architectures, all while trying to maintain credibility with engineers. That knowledge still matters. But when code can be generated, tested, and deployed at lightning speed, the bottleneck shifts away from “how it’s built” and toward “why it’s being built.”
I’ve personally leaned on AI tools recently to fill gaps in technical depth. Whether it’s spinning up a quick mock API or structuring a doc with AI, I can get enough grounding to move faster without slowing engineering down. But the true differentiator isn’t whether I care about the technical design—it’s whether I can articulate the customer need, define success metrics, and prioritize ruthlessly.
4. The Reckoning for PM Titles
The last decade saw an explosion of people with the “Product Manager” title. Some were doing the classic PM work of discovery, prioritization, and decision-making. Others were closer to project managers, business analysts, or even backlog administrators. In a slower world, that ambiguity was tolerable.
Now, it’s unforgiving. If you don’t have instincts rooted in customer knowledge, funnel analysis, or growth loops, you’ll get exposed. I’ve already seen it: some PMs thrive in this new environment, making faster calls, guiding their teams decisively. Others struggle because their muscles were built around process, not product thinking.
This isn’t meant as a critique, but as a reality check. The job has changed. The bar is higher.
5. Stay Embedded With Engineering
One thing that hasn’t changed—and is more important now—is staying close to your engineering team. Not just in standups, but day-to-day, in the trenches. There will also be more delegated decision making that needs to happen. Given the pace, you’ll need to set guidelines for the customer insights and product decisions so that the engineers and designers know how to make the right decision on the fly, without needing to ask for clarification on everything from product.
The lesson: engineers move fast when empowered, but PMs can’t disappear. Be available. Set the cadence. Clarify tradeoffs quickly. The closer you are to the team, the fewer bottlenecks you’ll create.
6. Organization Is a Competitive Advantage
This sounds simple, but it matters: the best-organized PMs will thrive in this new environment. When things move fast, knowing exactly what’s a priority, who’s accountable, and what tradeoffs you’re making becomes critical.
That said, I think it will change. Whereas historically, the job was to organize priorities and work closely against them with engineering, now your organization becomes more critical in terms of where you’ll focus. What are the bottlenecks engineering is facing? How can you remove them quickly. Where do they need you to weigh in so they can keep moving quickly?
I’ve always had a principle that my job as the product manager is to maximize “hands on keyboard time” for engineering. That is now taken to a whole new level given the speed with which dev moves. Your EPD trio needs to level set in order to keep up.
Organization isn’t glamorous, but it’s a superpower when speed is the game.
7. The Old Basics Still Matter
I’m excited about how AI is helping me as a PM—I use it to structure docs, brainstorm edge cases, and even stress-test a hypothesis. But those are accelerators, not replacements. The fundamentals haven’t changed:
Understanding funnels and drop-off points.
Knowing your growth loops and where they break.
Engaging with customers and business partners.
Setting clear goals and definitions of success.
The difference is that now, with faster engineering, you can’t hide behind slow cycles. You need to lead from the front. And you need to be leading with prototypes and rapid discovery from customers, not just writing old school PRDS.
Key Takeaways for PMs at All Levels
Customer insights are your currency. Don’t ship without them. The cost of wrong calls is now measured in wasted opportunities, not just wasted sprints.
Pattern-matching is your edge. Senior PMs have the advantage, but junior PMs can build it quickly by studying failures and shadowing experienced peers. Junior PMs can also learn the new patterns more rapidly and make that an unfair advantage.
Clarity and cadence beat complexity. Stay close to engineering, make decisions fast, and keep priorities crystal clear.
Final Thought
The acceleration of engineering is exciting, but it’s also a mirror. It reflects back to PMs where we add value—and where we don’t. If you’ve built your career on process alone, the coming years will be tough. If you’ve built your career on insights, decisions, and leadership, this is your moment.
The bottleneck has moved. The question is: are you ready to move with it?