Blog
Product Management Through the Golden Circle in the Age of AI
AI is not making product management obsolete—it is separating its enduring purpose from the work that can increasingly be automated. Viewed through the Golden Circle, the **Why** of product management remains unchanged: find and sustain the intersection of customer value and business value. The **What**—the decisions, interventions, artifacts, and deliverables product managers create—is being dramatically accelerated and automated by AI. The **How**—the learning, sensemaking, judgment, and wisdom required to make good decisions under uncertainty—is also being transformed, but AI introduces risks such as hallucination, shallow understanding, and false learning. As building becomes faster and cheaper, the real premium shifts toward product teams that can learn well, develop sound judgment, and determine what is actually worth building.
Product Management Through the Golden Circle in the Age of AI
If you’re feeling disrupted by AI as a product manager you’re not alone. Also, you’re probably not really doing product management. The core essence of product management is not being disrupted by AI, it is being amplified in importance and value. At the same AI, is disrupting much of what product managers do day-to-day. It isn’t eliminating product management. In fact, it is increasing the importance of nailing the purpose of product management.
The impact of AI on product management is different across various dimensions of the discipline. Simon Sinek’s concept of the Golden Circle is quite helpful at showing this. Let’s map product management to the Golden Circle.
The “Why” of product management is enduring. AI is not changing it. The “Why” of product management is to find the intersection between customer value and business value and stay in that intersection.
The “How” of product management is seeing some acceleration but also degradation due to AI. The “How” of product management is organizational learning that fosters wisdom. Specifically four types of learning that will be addressed in section 7.2. The “How” allows you to discover where that intersection exists, understand why, make good choices in spite of uncertainty, and adapt over time.
AI is compressing learning cycles but also introducing degradation like hallucinations, low explainability, and lack of deep understanding. It has the potential to reduce learning that turns into wisdom or even lead you to learn the wrong thing.
The “What” of product management is experiencing rapid change and disruption. The “What” of product management are the decisions, interventions and artifacts that product managers use to identify what is needs to be done and align teams to deliver. AI is quickly becoming the tool of choice for the creation, management, and distribution of various deliverables. Deliverables are being optimized for AI understanding and unfortunately that sometimes lessens human understanding.
All of this is actually putting a premium on product managers and product teams that have mastered how to accelerate the type of organizational learning that leads to wisdom, intuition, and judgement. The type of learning that leads to finding the intersection between customer value and business value. This is true product management and as downstream activities (e.g. engineering) become increasingly commoditized the center of product management is becoming more valuable by the day.
The “What” is being dramatically accelerated and increasingly automated. The “How” is being fundamentally transformed but needs guard rails. The “Why” stays the same.
We’re approaching a world where creating things is cheap, but knowing what is worth creating is incredibly valuable.