The Unspoken State of PM as of mid-2025
From the zookeeper’s desk, straight to your roadmap-induced group therapy session.
AI didn’t take your job—it multiplied it, split it into five roles, and asked you to do them all on 60% headcount and zero clarity. If you’re feeling productive, confused, and vaguely replaceable, welcome to product management in mid-2025 and …
Let’s Give Lenny His Well-Deserved, Data-Driven Bouquet
Once again,
gave us a sharp, data-backed snapshot of where the product hiring world is heading. A few highlights worth carving into your career whiteboard:Open PM roles are up 53.6% from 2023’s trough — You may resume light LinkedIn lurking.
AI PM roles are exploding — 688 and counting. That’s not a trend, it’s a full-blown hiring category.
Layoffs are slowing, which is good, while remote roles are quietly vanishing, which is... less good.
The Bay Area remains the center of the product universe — RDU: you're trying. Bless you.
For the full picture (and possibly your next role), start here:
👉 Lenny’s 2025 Product Market Breakdown
Meanwhile, in the Group Therapy Circle...
Yes, yes, yes, I know, feels like I'm 'coat-tailing' a bit on Lenny's awesome lists, but actually this ‘unauthorized version’ is simply inspired by him, rather than a parody or cheap tag along post in hopes of pimping up my Substack subcriptions.
Instead, as your trusted product management group therapist and unofficial zookeeper of PM dysfunction, I don’t just read the trends—I triage the trauma as I teach and consult. I hear the confessions usually only whispered in Kanban Confessionals between retros and the meltdowns muffled by Slack status updates.
So, without naming names (or tagging anyone on LinkedIn), here’s a sharper, snarkier, more reality-adjacent snapshot of PM life in mid-2025 that came to my warped mind as I read Lenny's post … with clickable receipts.
1. The AI PM Role Is Now the Swiss Army Knife of Desperation
You’re not a product manager anymore. You’re a:
Prompt engineer
Trust & safety specialist
Token cost negotiator
“Why is this model weird?” explainer
And somehow, still expected to deliver weekly demo-worthy progress.
Related:
2. Platform PMs Are Still the Middle Children of Product
You were promised architectural influence and long-term leverage.
What you got was “Can we ship this endpoint by next Tuesday?”
Also, there’s now a Notion page titled “Platform Backlog (Archived).”
Further Reading:
a16z: From Prompt to Product: The Rise of AI-Powered Web App Builders
Platform thinking in the age of Generative AI: A practical guide for Product Managers, Mind the Product
3. Intellectual Atrophy Is the Hidden Cost of AI
The layoffs may have slowed, but something subtler—and more insidious—is underway: our collective product brain is going soft.
What used to be strategic work is now mostly hitting “Regenerate” until it sounds right.
“As soon as the AI model is good enough, everyone tends to fall asleep at the wheel.”
— Ethan Mollick, MIT Sloan, July 2024
4. When the Prototype Becomes the Pitch Deck
Welcome to the era of Vibe Coding. Where one-person teams use AI to spin up slick prototypes that look like finished products but behave like audition reels for chaos.
It’s fast. It’s fun. It’s dangerous. And you’re expected to think like a machine learning engineer, move like a rapid prototyper, and explain it all like a seasoned PM—with none of the power, resources, or time to actually validate it.
Because now, leadership sees Figma click-throughs and GPT-laced demo flows and says: “Ship it!” before anyone’s validated the problem, run a usability test, or checked the data dependencies hiding under the hood.
The burden falls back on product teams to:
Visually validate faster, without mistaking polish for proof
Translate vibes into evidence
Set clearer expectations between artifact and asset
- : Vibe Coding and Vibe Design
SHRM: Shadow AI Is on the Rise (If they haven’t written this yet, they will.)
Dig like an Arms Merchant, Deal like a Peacemaker — on using AI to explore, not explode.
5. Agentic Anxiety Is the New Burnout
You're not worried AI will replace you.
You're worried leadership will ask you to become it.
“Be more agentic,” they say—while giving you the autonomy of a Roomba and the accountability of a CTO.
6. AI-First Culture Is the New “Move Fast and Break Things”
In case you missed the memo (and the Medium post), CEOs everywhere are declaring AI the new cultural cornerstone:
Shopify’s CEO: “AI is our new language.”
Every other CEO: “Same. But with less headcount.”
7. We’re Still Confusing Tool Mastery With Product Leadership
Yes, your stack is optimized.
Yes, you have AI copilots and an atomic design system.
And still, you shipped three things no one uses and one thing Legal had to pull.
Productside: AI and Product Managers: What We Can Learn From Iron Man
Productside: Outputs vs. Outcomes
Webinar: Getting Real Product Management ‘Sh!t’ Done With AI - Revisited
Closing Thoughts (Before You Spiral into the Slack Abyss)
If Lenny gave us the company-wide broadcast, this is the backchannel DMs.
Yes, the market is bouncing back.
No, your calendar isn’t.
Yes, AI is changing everything.
No, it still can’t write your strategy for you. (Yet.)
In 2025, you are:
A prototype illusionist — conjuring product-shaped smoke from AI tools, then explaining why it's not real (yet) (Fake it 'til your execs believe it.)
A prompt conjurer — shaping chaos into GPT-powered clarvoiance.
A metrics apologist — defending dashboards built on vibes
A budget whisperer — stretching cents into strategy briefs
And, still, the designated adult in every stakeholder meeting — because someone has to clean up the digital glitter
Good luck. Ship smart. Take breaks. And for the love of everything, stop saying yes to “quick syncs.”
Call(s) to Action
Tired of feeling like the last sane person in a roadmap planning meeting?
Join the conversation. Share your war stories. Forward this to your favorite overwhelmed PM.
And if you’ve got your own 2025 PM survival tactic or therapy trick—drop it in the comments. We’ll trade notes. Or just scream into the void together.