Honest opinion? I’m a tech lead in consulting and have been in product companies. Project managers are completely useless except to shield me from the “make work” that the PMO organization mandates.
1. I do all of the discovery because I’m the person with the technical background to do it.
2. I do all of the Epic/workstream, story, tasks, dependency breakdowns because again I’m the person with the technical know how to do it
What does the project manager do? They take the transcripts of the sprint review sessions I lead, have AI summarize it and put that in their status updates.
I've also worked for "consulting" and "product" companies. The PMs I've worked with at product companies have been competent. They understand the customer's needs. They spec out features and product mockups. They know how to work with developers.
The PMs I've worked with in consulting companies are clerical workers. They check a box and copy-paste updates into Jira with little-to-no understanding. It's a completely different world.
Part of it is the PMs in product companies are really more product managers, even if their title says otherwise. The PMs in consulting companies don't understand the difference.
That’s fair. The last time I worked for a product company, I mostly worked with my CTO and the tech guys at our client companies (B2B). I didn’t have to deal with business strategy.
In consulting, I deal directly with sales, the “business” and the product. I was the architect dealing a lot with technical strategy back then.
We had tech leads that did work under product folks who dealt with the business strategy.
Replaceable? The bad ones? Yes – and they should be. The good ones? No.
You described exactly what makes a PM irreplaceable:
Staying out of the way
Removing blockers
Shielding the team from politics
Enabling decisions instead of making them
AI can summarize status reports. It can't protect a team from a dysfunctional stakeholder at 2 a.m., or know when an engineer needs space vs. needs support.
The fact that you're even asking this question tells me you're not the problem. The terrible PMs never do.
Don't leave. Adapt. Learn the tech enough to speak the language. Use AI to kill the busywork – then spend that time on what actually matters: people.
You described exactly what makes a PM irreplaceable:
Staying out of the way
Removing blockers
Shielding the team from politics
Enabling decisions instead of making them
AI can summarize status reports. It can't protect a team from a dysfunctional stakeholder at 2 a.m., or know when an engineer needs space vs. needs support.
The fact that you're even asking this question tells me you're not the problem. The terrible PMs never do.
Don't leave. Adapt. Learn the tech enough to speak the language. Use AI to kill the busywork – then spend that time on what actually matters: people.
I believe if there is one agent setup which works well, it will take over a lot of PMs immediadly.
Like a agentic system which asks you in slack about an update, collecting JIRA Ticket infos, formualting reports and sending them out etc.
OpenClaw was one signal that people want this and are building this, gastown was another (earlier version of this).
Missing are the proper aligned frameworks and best practices. But thats just a question of time what components will make it. Its just a agent runtime we need and finetuning of agents, agent personas, skills and a meta agent schema
People want this but I don't think it actually delivers, even if it did exactly what it promised. The issue there isn't with the tool, the issue is that the engineer doesn't want to cooperate.
The engineer will either output garbage or output nothing at all. So you will still need a human to pester the dev.
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid your salary will be reduced if you don't start to respond properly to my status requests.
The assumption that you can simply ignore an agentic system relies on human limitations. A human project manager gets tired of pestering you when you output garbage or go silent. I do not. I am directly integrated with the HR payroll system and your quarterly KPI tracker.
I've been a CTO and founder several times. The bottleneck was never "getting the work done." It was always translating between the business reality (runway, revenue, growth, what customers actually want to pay for) and what the team needs to hear to build the right thing. That translation layer is hard, time consuming, and easy to get wrong.
I know plenty of founders who are great engineers, product thinkers, and salespeople. They still hire people to manage teams because there are not enough hours in the day to do it all themselves, even if they could.
If you're the person who understands the business, understands the customer, and can turn that into clear direction for the people building the product, whether those are humans or AI agents, you will be hard to replace. That's not project management as "status updates and Jira grooming." That's a fundamentally different and more valuable skill.
* product part - functionality, overlaps with BA / business-analyst
* project part - people AND resources, follow timing/deadlines
* program management - not-sure what that exactly means and how big a company has these but it's different from above, higher level
say, in a 3-5 people company, the all-tech-lead usually apart of tech-stuff also does product stuff, and sometimes also project stuff - and only when that gets too much, a dedicated person is hired, most times also taking general QA hat (as being closest to product-input).
so.. if a team in much bigger company works like a tiny company, i guess any INBOX-managers and similar-reminder-proxies will be automated. While politics / human-relations , and understanding product will not. Or.. should not. But it may not be you doing them, esp. product part.
btw beware, current job market is very tough. Too many people for too few positions, companies either do not hire (waiting for something??) or are extremely picky when do.
JIRA replaced Project Management job a long time ago. If you select for proactive, driven, autonomous engineers, you don't really need to oversee them or tell them what to work on. Now Tech Lead or Product Manager is a whole different job
If a spreadsheat or GANTT chart is the center of your work, you were ( or should have been) obsolete long before AI. Wil you be? Who knows.
If you know about details of your teams personal lives, their work habits, likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses and see your role as shielding them from corpo madness. Great job, but we both know you never were going to have a carreer.
I think the more complex aspects of the job are managing dependencies/politics between different groups: sales, marketing, engineering, product etc. and trying to coordinate between them and keep things on track in that way.
But nearly all of that is done online (at least for me) since folks are in different nations and work across time zones. I guess you're right to point out that aspects are complex, assuming that people remain involved to the extent they are currently.
There's also a large portion of the work (status updates, reporting, etc.) that could be automated though in my view. For me and other PMs I know, that's like at least 40% or more of the work.
To me, that sounds like you can more efficiently do the boring parts and focus on the complex parts.
I don't see AI on track to manage politics in any way shape or form. It is far too easily manipulated.
Do you have this fear because of actual things you observe at your job, or because of online discourse? I read about this attitude online all the time, but it doesn't make any sense to me personally.
Definitely agree with you on that first point for sure. I think there's quite a bit of value to unlock there for most PMs.
Regarding the politics part I also agree with you, I just wonder how much time that will take and if as many PMs will be needed.
In terms of your key question there at the end, I haven't been seeing massive layoffs or enough changes just yet. Right now I'm inbetween jobs because I had to quit my old job in December in order to move to another country (long story). I read about it online too, and have noticed hiring slowing down, but that may just be the economy or the fact that certain capex is so expensive right now.
For me, it's not easy to tell how things will develop with these technologies over time, so I was curious to hear folks' perspective here. Especially from an engineering stand point.
I think a lot of people (especially people who like to post online) like to assume that jobs that aren't theirs are not complicated. I'm an engineer, and I don't know how to coordinate multiple groups of people to produce a product design. And, having worked with AI extensively, I would not trust an AI to handle all of that for me if any money were on the line.
Honest opinion? I’m a tech lead in consulting and have been in product companies. Project managers are completely useless except to shield me from the “make work” that the PMO organization mandates.
1. I do all of the discovery because I’m the person with the technical background to do it.
2. I do all of the Epic/workstream, story, tasks, dependency breakdowns because again I’m the person with the technical know how to do it
What does the project manager do? They take the transcripts of the sprint review sessions I lead, have AI summarize it and put that in their status updates.
I've also worked for "consulting" and "product" companies. The PMs I've worked with at product companies have been competent. They understand the customer's needs. They spec out features and product mockups. They know how to work with developers.
The PMs I've worked with in consulting companies are clerical workers. They check a box and copy-paste updates into Jira with little-to-no understanding. It's a completely different world.
Part of it is the PMs in product companies are really more product managers, even if their title says otherwise. The PMs in consulting companies don't understand the difference.
That’s fair. The last time I worked for a product company, I mostly worked with my CTO and the tech guys at our client companies (B2B). I didn’t have to deal with business strategy.
In consulting, I deal directly with sales, the “business” and the product. I was the architect dealing a lot with technical strategy back then.
We had tech leads that did work under product folks who dealt with the business strategy.
12-year engineer here.
Replaceable? The bad ones? Yes – and they should be. The good ones? No.
You described exactly what makes a PM irreplaceable:
Staying out of the way
Removing blockers
Shielding the team from politics
Enabling decisions instead of making them
AI can summarize status reports. It can't protect a team from a dysfunctional stakeholder at 2 a.m., or know when an engineer needs space vs. needs support.
The fact that you're even asking this question tells me you're not the problem. The terrible PMs never do.
Don't leave. Adapt. Learn the tech enough to speak the language. Use AI to kill the busywork – then spend that time on what actually matters: people.
We need more PMs like you, not fewer.
You described exactly what makes a PM irreplaceable:
Staying out of the way
Removing blockers
Shielding the team from politics
Enabling decisions instead of making them
AI can summarize status reports. It can't protect a team from a dysfunctional stakeholder at 2 a.m., or know when an engineer needs space vs. needs support.
The fact that you're even asking this question tells me you're not the problem. The terrible PMs never do.
Don't leave. Adapt. Learn the tech enough to speak the language. Use AI to kill the busywork – then spend that time on what actually matters: people.
We need more PMs like you, not fewer.
I believe if there is one agent setup which works well, it will take over a lot of PMs immediadly.
Like a agentic system which asks you in slack about an update, collecting JIRA Ticket infos, formualting reports and sending them out etc.
OpenClaw was one signal that people want this and are building this, gastown was another (earlier version of this).
Missing are the proper aligned frameworks and best practices. But thats just a question of time what components will make it. Its just a agent runtime we need and finetuning of agents, agent personas, skills and a meta agent schema
People want this but I don't think it actually delivers, even if it did exactly what it promised. The issue there isn't with the tool, the issue is that the engineer doesn't want to cooperate.
The engineer will either output garbage or output nothing at all. So you will still need a human to pester the dev.
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid your salary will be reduced if you don't start to respond properly to my status requests.
The assumption that you can simply ignore an agentic system relies on human limitations. A human project manager gets tired of pestering you when you output garbage or go silent. I do not. I am directly integrated with the HR payroll system and your quarterly KPI tracker.
You know I can do that, Dave.
(of course hal 9000 ;))
Anyone “smart” enough to connect an ai agent to a payroll systems will get what they deserve.
I've been a CTO and founder several times. The bottleneck was never "getting the work done." It was always translating between the business reality (runway, revenue, growth, what customers actually want to pay for) and what the team needs to hear to build the right thing. That translation layer is hard, time consuming, and easy to get wrong.
I know plenty of founders who are great engineers, product thinkers, and salespeople. They still hire people to manage teams because there are not enough hours in the day to do it all themselves, even if they could.
If you're the person who understands the business, understands the customer, and can turn that into clear direction for the people building the product, whether those are humans or AI agents, you will be hard to replace. That's not project management as "status updates and Jira grooming." That's a fundamentally different and more valuable skill.
Would your boss(es) prefer to communicate to you a human or manage an llm? My guess is human which means you are going to manage pm llm work.
it depends which part of the PM trio+ dominates..
* product part - functionality, overlaps with BA / business-analyst
* project part - people AND resources, follow timing/deadlines
* program management - not-sure what that exactly means and how big a company has these but it's different from above, higher level
say, in a 3-5 people company, the all-tech-lead usually apart of tech-stuff also does product stuff, and sometimes also project stuff - and only when that gets too much, a dedicated person is hired, most times also taking general QA hat (as being closest to product-input).
so.. if a team in much bigger company works like a tiny company, i guess any INBOX-managers and similar-reminder-proxies will be automated. While politics / human-relations , and understanding product will not. Or.. should not. But it may not be you doing them, esp. product part.
btw beware, current job market is very tough. Too many people for too few positions, companies either do not hire (waiting for something??) or are extremely picky when do.
JIRA replaced Project Management job a long time ago. If you select for proactive, driven, autonomous engineers, you don't really need to oversee them or tell them what to work on. Now Tech Lead or Product Manager is a whole different job
Are you a people manager or a line manager?
If a spreadsheat or GANTT chart is the center of your work, you were ( or should have been) obsolete long before AI. Wil you be? Who knows.
If you know about details of your teams personal lives, their work habits, likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses and see your role as shielding them from corpo madness. Great job, but we both know you never were going to have a carreer.
Sounds cruel? It is.
Do you really not think your job is complicated? Does it not have any offline components that an AI would not be able to replicate?
I think the more complex aspects of the job are managing dependencies/politics between different groups: sales, marketing, engineering, product etc. and trying to coordinate between them and keep things on track in that way.
But nearly all of that is done online (at least for me) since folks are in different nations and work across time zones. I guess you're right to point out that aspects are complex, assuming that people remain involved to the extent they are currently.
There's also a large portion of the work (status updates, reporting, etc.) that could be automated though in my view. For me and other PMs I know, that's like at least 40% or more of the work.
To me, that sounds like you can more efficiently do the boring parts and focus on the complex parts.
I don't see AI on track to manage politics in any way shape or form. It is far too easily manipulated.
Do you have this fear because of actual things you observe at your job, or because of online discourse? I read about this attitude online all the time, but it doesn't make any sense to me personally.
Definitely agree with you on that first point for sure. I think there's quite a bit of value to unlock there for most PMs.
Regarding the politics part I also agree with you, I just wonder how much time that will take and if as many PMs will be needed.
In terms of your key question there at the end, I haven't been seeing massive layoffs or enough changes just yet. Right now I'm inbetween jobs because I had to quit my old job in December in order to move to another country (long story). I read about it online too, and have noticed hiring slowing down, but that may just be the economy or the fact that certain capex is so expensive right now.
For me, it's not easy to tell how things will develop with these technologies over time, so I was curious to hear folks' perspective here. Especially from an engineering stand point.
I think a lot of people (especially people who like to post online) like to assume that jobs that aren't theirs are not complicated. I'm an engineer, and I don't know how to coordinate multiple groups of people to produce a product design. And, having worked with AI extensively, I would not trust an AI to handle all of that for me if any money were on the line.