The 8Ps of product (still true with AI)

This post sat in my drafts for 8 years.

After selling my company and finally taking a real break, it felt like the right time to bring this to life—especially now, when change feels like the only constant.

I’ve lived product from nearly every angle: individual contributor, product leader, VC investor in 70+ startups, founder who raised from VC and exited, and now coach to founders navigating the mess. Each role added a layer, a shift in perspective.

After hundreds of conversations and battles in the trenches, I’ve boiled it down to eight principles. No theory here—just the stuff I kept turning to. The things that still matter, especially now as AI shifts the ground beneath us.

1. People

Product managers serve two groups: the people building the product—and the people using it.

You succeed when your team does. You lead by influence, not authority—earning trust, unblocking teammates, and creating space to do the work of their lives.

You also succeed when your customer does—when the product meaningfully improves their lives or levels up their business. You're their advocate in every decision, especially when it would be easier not to be.

Your most powerful currency is the number of favours people owe you because you consistently remove obstacles from their path.

As AI takes over the analytical grind, your edge becomes human: empathy, intuition, and the ability to rally a team around a mission. Think of AI as a team member with extraordinary analytical skills but limited emotional intelligence (for now).

2. Purpose

We carry the “why.” Product managers champion purpose when others get lost in the weeds.

Purpose isn’t a mission statement on the wall. It’s the through-line that connects daily work to meaningful outcomes. It answers: “Why does this matter?”

AI can accelerate execution—but it can’t define direction. That responsibility is still ours. As the pace picks up, staying anchored to “why” becomes even more critical. You’re not just shipping features. You’re making sure the product doesn’t lose the plot.

3. (p)ower

With a small “p”—because we lead without authority.

You don’t control engineering, design, or marketing. But you still need all of them to ship. That’s the paradox of product.

You build power through competence, consistency, and empathy. You align teams, not through title, but through trust. Influence isn’t granted—it’s earned, slowly and quietly.

As AI takes on more decisions and detail, your value is in the messy human middle: listening, persuading, translating. The work between the lines is where product lives.

4. Problem

We don’t just solve problems—we curate them.

Great PMs live in the problem space. We define what’s worth solving, not just how to solve it. That means customer pain, team blockers, business trade-offs—deciding which fire is worth fighting.

AI’s great at solving clearly scoped problems. But it’s not great at asking, “Is this the right one?” That’s your job. You’re the editor, filtering noise, surfacing signal, and making sure the team solves the problems that matter.

5. Perspective

Product managers live in the grey. Curiosity and empathy are our guide—not to be right, but to understand what’s true for whom, and in what context.

You toggle between customer pain, business goals, team constraints, and market shifts—often within the same meeting. That takes humility, not ego. Curiosity, not certainty.

AI can surface perspectives at scale, but it can’t make sense of the tension between them. That’s you. You hold the complexity, ask the better question, and turn contradictions into clarity.

6. Pattern

Experience compounds. You start to see the same problems wearing different clothes.

Great PMs build a mental library—of wins, face-plants, customer quotes, frameworks, gut checks. You start spotting patterns faster, avoiding past traps, and moving with more confidence.

AI can identify patterns across massive datasets. But it lacks context. It doesn’t know which patterns matter—or when they break. That’s where your judgment comes in. You’re the filter between what looks true and what’s actually useful.

7. Prioritization

Prioritization is your sharpest tool. Use it well—or everything slows down, spreads thin, or loses focus.

Prioritize your team. Prioritize learning. Prioritize the “why”. Say no whenever needed—and be able to persuasively articulate why.

In a world of infinite ideas but finite capacity, clarity is your competitive advantage. Great PMs use transparent frameworks to cut through noise and stay aligned on what matters most.

AI can crunch trade-offs, but it can’t make value calls. That’s still your job. You bring the judgment. You hold the line.

8. Prompt

Prompting is the becoming meta-skill of product management.

We’ve moved past asking AI for answers. With agents, prompting means setting direction, defining boundaries, and guiding decisions like you would with any teammate.

To do that well, you need all the other Ps: clarity of purpose to guide the mission, perspective to hold competing truths, pattern recognition to connect dots faster, problem curation to focus effort, (p)ower to align stakeholders—including AI—people skills to rally teams, and prioritization to stay focused.

Start treating AI like a teammate. Not a threat. Not just a tool. A coworker with extreme pattern recognition, limited intuition, and no awareness of context—until you provide it.

Your job is to collaborate with AI to improve the lives of your customers and your team.

Product still needs a human (just fewer of us)

A PM’s job description often reads like a superhero spec: fluent in data, strategy, empathy, design, leadership, and delivery.

But no one nails it all. The real job is staying curious, staying clear, and Help your team—and your AI teammate—do their best work.

We’ll need fewer humans in product. The ones who thrive will ask better questions, curate better problems, and pair human judgment with machine intelligence.

And as long as we’re building for humans, context, emotion, and intuition will still be your edge.

The 8Ps won’t tell you what to build. But they’ll remind you who you’re building for—and why it matters.

If the day comes when we start building products for AI instead of humans… well... we’ll need a new playbook.