The PM job is splitting in two
One half is being automated fast. The other half is becoming the whole job.
Most of what a product manager does in a week is not judgement. It is retrieval. Finding the decision from March, remembering which constraint killed the simpler design, reconstructing why the API looks the way it does before you can write a single acceptance criterion.
That half of the job is being automated, and quickly. The half that is left — deciding what is worth building, and who is accountable when it is wrong — is not.
Retrieval was never the value
It only looked like value because it was expensive. When something costs three days, it acquires the shape of work. Nobody thanked you for reading the transcripts; they thanked you for the spec that came out the other side, and you knew privately that most of the effort went into the reading.
Remove the cost and the shape collapses. What remains is the part that was always the job: choosing.
What this changes about seniority
Seniority in product has quietly rewarded memory. The person who had been there longest could tell you why the thing was the way it was, and that made them load-bearing. When the memory becomes institutional rather than personal, seniority has to mean something else — usually the quality of the trade-offs you are willing to defend.
If your advantage is that you remember, your advantage has an expiry date.
That is not a threat so much as a redistribution. A PM three weeks into a role can now start from the same context as one three years in. What separates them is what they do with it.
Stop writing PRDs without understanding the product.
Anchor reads your interviews, tickets and docs first — then writes, citing every line.
