Creative destruction isn’t a threat to your career. It’s the path to your edge.
Steve Jobs didn’t defend the iPod. He replaced it.
He knew the iPhone would eat iPod sales. He shipped it anyway because that’s the natural order in technology: either you cannibalize yourself, or someone else will.
That same pressure is now sitting on the day-to-day work of product managers.
The repeatable parts—condensing meeting notes, drafting product requirement documents, writing acceptance criteria, creating tickets, syncing status—are ready for automation.
So the real question isn’t “Will automation take my job?”
It’s: Will you design the system that removes your busywork so you can do the part only you can do—taste, judgment, and bold bets?
First principles: what a product manager is paid to do
Strip the role down to load-bearing pieces:
Coordinate
Move information between people and tools. Scheduling, summarizing, ticket typing, status chasing.
Synthesize
Turn raw signals into a single narrative: what changed, why it matters, what to do next.
Decide
Say no to most things, yes to a few, and define the finish line in plain terms.
Practice taste
Hold the line on values, reduce the product to its essence, and protect attention so the important work actually finishes.
Now be honest: which of these should a machine do, and which must a human own?
The automation frontier (today)
Work type
| Can a machine do it now?
| Why
| What you should do
|
|---|
Coordinate (summaries, document updates, ticket typing, status sync)
| Yes, reliably
| Repeatable rules; context already lives in tools
| Hand it off. Keep final review.
|
Synthesize (draft product requirement sections, extract decisions, link evidence)
| Yes, with your edit
| Inputs are structured enough; drafts benefit from human judgment
| Automate the first draft. You do the edit.
|
Decide (what gets built now vs. later)
| Not yet
| Values, leverage, risk tradeoffs
| Own it. Use data; keep the call.
|
Practice taste (subtraction under noise)
| No
| Judgment shaped by experience
| Own it. That’s your moat.
|
If you cling to coordination, you’ll be replaced.
If you elevate into synthesis, decision, and taste, you become hard to replace.
What “creative destruction” looks like in your week
Before
Mornings rewriting scattered notes into a product requirement document.
Afternoons copying the same context into a tracker.
Evenings lost to “one more pass” on acceptance criteria.
After you self-cannibalize
You start with a top three list distilled from yesterday’s calls, chat, calendar, documents, and product data.
A system drafts the new product requirement section and tickets; you only edit.
You ship smaller bets faster because the finish line is written in plain language: the single user behavior you intend to change and how you’ll know.
The work gets quieter: fewer handoffs, fewer re-types, fewer status theatrics.
“I bounce between analytics, heatmaps, tickets, and waiting days for implementation. Give me one place where insights connect to the change and deploy the best variant for that user.” — A growth-PM's insight
Exactly. Your stack should stop being a museum of dashboards and start being a pipeline from signal → decision → shipped change.
Money talk: why this raises your compensation and builds a moat
Companies don’t pay for keystrokes. They pay for judgment that moves a metric.
A simple, believable model:
Cycle time: Cutting idea-to-proof from 10 days to 3 lets you run ~3 times more real experiments per month.
Hit rate: If your “top three each day” improves the share of actions that move the target behavior from 20% to 35%, your wins per quarter nearly double.
Talent signal: More shipped learning with less drama reads as seniority. Senior people get the raise, the equity, and the hard problems.
Compounding effect (example):
You ship 36 proofs in a quarter instead of 12.
At a 35% hit rate, that’s ~13 wins vs. ~2–3 before.
More wins → larger scope → larger comp. The moat isn’t secrecy; it’s throughput of good judgment.
Or as one commenter put it: don’t get paid for time or effort—get rewarded for judgment. Automation exposes that judgment. That’s good news for people who have it.
The editor’s loop (how you actually work)
Think like a film editor. The camera captured 40 hours; your job is to cut.
Listen
Pull raw inputs: calls, support threads, analytics, decision notes.
Filter
Judge ideas on two axes only: impact on one behavior × time to first proof.
Decide
Pick three moves for the next 24–72 hours. If everything is a priority, nothing is.
Ship
Define “done” as a behavior change with clear acceptance criteria (Given / When / Then written in plain English). Ship to the smallest audience that can prove or falsify.
Learn
Compare outcomes to the single measure you targeted. Keep, kill, or iterate. Then repeat.
Automation doesn’t do your craft. It removes the sand in the gears.
Addressing the real objections
“Tools won’t fix a weak growth culture.”
True. The tool should force better thinking by making the path from signal to shipped change embarrassingly short. The habit change is choosing, daily, to ship tiny proofs instead of polishing decks.
“Who owns growth—product or marketing?”
In modern teams, growth is a discipline across the funnel, not a silo. Automation helps by unifying the loop so every builder can practice growth with the same rigor.
“Will automation erase the craft?”
No. It erases retyping. What remains—taste under noise, subtraction, the call to stop—is the craft.
“Specs as the new source code?”
Yes. When your product requirement document is living and executable—linked to evidence, tickets, and acceptance criteria—your spec becomes the control system for change.
Write your replacement plan (this week)
List every task a system should do in your week. If it doesn’t require judgment, it’s a candidate.
Codify inputs and outputs. Example: “After a customer call, produce a product requirement section, acceptance criteria in Given-When-Then, and two tickets—with links to evidence.”
Keep a kill list. Every Friday, remove one feature, meeting, document, or “nice-to-have” request. Taste is subtraction.
Measure what matters:
Days to first proof (idea to real user signal ≤ 72 hours)
Top-three hit rate (share of moves that moved the behavior)
Meaningful subtractions (one every two weeks)
Busy isn’t leverage. Finished, useful work is leverage.
Start here (no ceremony, no process theater)
Wake up to a top-three list in your inbox.
Pulled from yesterday’s calls, chat, calendar, documents, and product data; scored by impact on one behavior × time to first proof.
Edit drafts, don’t start from blank pages.
Real conversations become a living product requirement document, acceptance criteria, and ready-to-start tickets. You edit once; the system keeps everything in sync.
Run the editor’s loop for 30 days. Track only three measures.
If the three don’t move, automate more and cut harder. If they do, good—you just got your real job back.
What Tastefully automates today (so you can do the human part)
Coordination: meeting digests, decision logs, document updates, ticket creation, status sync across your tools.
Synthesis first draft: product requirement sections with linked evidence; acceptance criteria in plain English.
Integrated signals: product analytics, session recordings, support threads, and notes pulled into one view that proposes the next three moves.
Loop discipline: small, targeted releases to the smallest audience that can prove or falsify; automatic follow-ups to learn and log outcomes.
Behind the scenes we obsess over workflow completion rate, tokens per workflow, cost per workflow, model routing, and user privacy—so you can obsess over judgment.
A final word on taste
Rick Rubin calls himself a reducer. Film editors win Oscars because they cut the footage into a story people actually want to watch. That’s the work.
Automation is not your rival. It is the delete key that gives you room to practice taste.
Use it. Cut nine. Ship one.
