The era of the super IC PM

Reading time: 10 minutes

Topic: Product management

I’m a huge fan of Claire Vo so when Config rolled around at the end of June, I was most excited to watch her speak. You can also watch the 24-minute recording here.

I’ve watched the talk a few times and her message was simple, and a canary in the coal mine:

Product-as-usual is dead ☠️

It isn’t a surprise that the industry that was the most susceptible to AI disruption is the technology industry, and the function that was exposed was product management.

Product management is the most squishy function to begin with. Ask three product managers what a product manager does and you’ll get three different definitions. One person might define it by how they spend their time (”I spend all my time in meetings getting alignment”), another person by responsibilities (”I’m someone who spends time thinking about what is feasible, viable and usable”) and another person by job title (”I’m the CEO of a product”).

I’ve heard people question multiple times why certain companies might report their highest earnings and pay out dividends while continuing to conduct layoffs, knowing the coffers are full. Companies just made an assumption that product managers could become a lot more productive. Expectations for PMs just became a lot higher.

As Claire mentioned, this has introduced the era of the super IC PM (IC = “Individual Contributor”).

While the rate of change for product management was minimal over the last 10 years, the last 18 months has brought a bigger leap in the shape of the role. You can continue to follow the rules that you learned over your career if you wish, but it might be better to adapt and try new things out, because the rules have changed.

What I like about this era is that you have the ability to shape what the product management discipline function looks like as expectations change and everyone figures out together how product development works in tech.

Three PM archetypes

These are three archetypes that are going to be more successful in the next decade (slightly different from Claire’s):

1. The entrepreneur: the person who feels like working at a company is not just a job but feels full ownership of their success. They are willing to take on big decisions and sometimes take risks because they want to leverage the new ways of shaping products at the company

2. The pm-designer-engineer: I’ve seen a rise of the multi-hat product manager, this tweet from Kevin Yien resonated with me. I believe the person who has learned many skills and can act as the product manager/designer/engineer and flex where needed will thrive in today’s environment. It’s rare today, but I believe we will see more of these profiles in the next 5-10 years

3. The high octane PM: The PM that can get 10 things done in a day, and outproduce most. The team is never blocked by the progress of a PM (this is the promise that AI is supposedly making)

These are not the only archetypes that will succeed, nor are they mutually exclusive, but they have a clear advantage in the race. While I’ve always leaned into being a high octane PM, I’m finding myself spending more time learning how to code simple tools for fun and learning how to build a simple newsletter and see who might pay for it as simple ways to practice being entrepreneurial and obtaining more technical skills as a PM.

Three truths and some caveats

There were a couple of specific things that Claire highlighted that resonated with me. I’ve translated them into three specific hypotheses.

Over the next ten years,

Truth #1: You’ll be tied more closely to revenue

In the last decade, I’ve seen many companies struggle to actually measure success. Many were measured by how many products they shipped.

For the next decade, product managers will not just be accountable to measurable outcomes, but they will be accountable to financial outcomes and whether they boost revenue. Start-ups and large companies alike are now looking at revenue per employee, with companies targeting the high six digits or $1M per employee, aided by AI.

It’s not just about the KPIs you move - whether you increased number of users, how you increased time spent on the platform. It’s about how you help the company make money. Partnering with sales and marketing even more by doing demos, running customer monthly meetings and tying more closely together the revenue that a product has unlocked is critical for the next generation’s product management.

Some ways to get smart here:

1. Understanding your company’s business model

2. Understanding the sales pitch your company uses to sell the value of your product and figuring out whether the company leverages marketing, sales, or a mix of both and how the sales funnel is set up

3. Watching a few customer demos and understanding how prospects get to “yes”. Understanding the reasons they might say no.

4. Tying your product to how it makes money, whether it’s net new revenue lines, increasing newly acquired customers or expanding the contract value with current customers.

5. Understanding how finance or sales builds out the revenue projections, build out your own model for yourself. Look back a few months later to see how you’ve measured up to it.

Your business sense about your product will pay off in spades in the next decade. This isn’t the GM-role but the expectation for someone on the product/eng/design side as the GTM part becomes more of a co-creation exercise.

Truth #2: You’ll produce the output of 3 PMs, you won’t manage 3 PMs

I’ve been a manager twice over and then went back to being an IC. These roles look entirely different. An IC is required to be great at execution. Being great at execution is different from being able to coach a team of product managers on being great at execution. In fact, the first mistake first time managers make is trying to control a report’s execution by micromanaging.

Over the last decade, the main way to advance in your career was becoming a manager. You might have shown how successful you were by how many people you managed. That was how you expanded your product surfaces and multiplied outcomes at your company.

However, being a manager now is no longer relevant. It no longer matters if you are managing more people who can manage multiple product launches when the company is looking at YOU to manage all of these projects.

Companies have gotten rid of the middle layer of managers. Companies with 200+ employees that had 1. ICs, 2. middle managers, and 3. executives that are manager of managers evolved to having ICs and executives through an organizational evolution accelerated with AI.

There is a huge benefit from reducing this middle layer. The biggest advantage is the reduction in process debt in managing communication lines and people across products.

However, it’s become critical for PMs to figure out how to manage multiple product areas. You’ll need to break down and manage the strategy of different products, understanding the connective tissue between these products and how a customer might first use one product and then another product within their product experience.

Some ways to get smart here:

1. Understanding all the product lines your company manages.

2. Going through the product experience end-to-end. Understanding how a user might start with using one product and then discover, activate and engage with another product in the product suite.

3. Writing down a clear and specific Job to be Done for each product. Understanding how the JTBD connect to each other and how they differ between products.

4. Building out a diagram for how the products in the product portfolio should be sequenced in a customer lifecycle. Lay out they various entry points and the connective tissue that should exist between experiences.

Here’s another quote from Dan Hockenmeier, the Chief Strategy Officer of Faire

10x PM

Truth #3: You’ve mastered context switching

Why is there this big assumption that product managers are going to be more productive in the coming decade? Mainly because of the assumption that as AI gets smarter, it can take over certain workflows. Claire Vo is a weekend hacker building ChatPRD. It’s an assistant for PMs who need to write a PRD for their team. What would normally take them hours now takes 15 minutes.

With pieces and parts of a product manager role’s automated with AI, this gives a PM more ability to take on more scope and move faster. Claire argues that the smaller product improvements can be managed by AI and that PMs can focus their time on large step function product launches.

Your ability to context switch and manage vastly different level of details for your product surface will be critical. You can to dive into the weeds and connect it to company strategy, multiple times a day with confidence and different teams.

In a nutshell, during the next decade:

1. You’ll be tied more closely to revenue

2. You’ll produce the output of 3 PMs, you won’t manage 3 PMs

3. You’ve mastered context switching

Here are all of the attributes that Claire shared for the Super IC Product Manager.

Caveats

As we move towards a more productive world, I do think that product managers run the risk of burnout even further with a need to stretch even further, managing multiple products, increasing velocity and being more comfortable in uncomfortable situations. With that, figuring out how to pace yourself and protecting your personal time remains critical.

I also don’t think that AI today increases speed of a PM in all areas. We are seeing some great assistance in writing PRDs or building out your product strategy. However, today, I spend a lot of my time, reviewing and editing the AI outputs I receive from GPT 4o or Claude. It’s like working with a junior PM that needs some handholding and guidance.

The outputs also have a veneer of being created by artificial intelligence that makes writing outputs all sound kind of similar. Here’s an example of Shreyas’ job posting for a head of business operations:

While we might get to a world where AI truly empowers us to move faster, I don’t think it’s good at moving us fast in all aspects of product management.