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Many fear AI is about to take over jobs, replace humans, and run the product development lifecycle on its own. But the reality is quite the opposite. Having witnessed 25 years of product leadership evolution I believe AI is here to empower product leaders, not replace them.
The best product leaders understand that leadership goes far beyond managing backlogs, wrangling spreadsheets, or sitting in meetings. AI, while powerful, doesn’t eliminate the importance of vision, empathy, and culture. It optimizes the mundane tasks—like backlog grooming, spreadsheet wrangling, and data analysis—so product leaders and their teams can focus on what truly matters: problem solving, customer insights, and execution.
In my book Product Leadership, we explored what it means to lead in a shifting tech environment. Today, I want to dive into how those same principles hold up in the age of AI and how leaders can harness these tools without losing sight of the human element.
1. Leadership Isn’t About Managing the Product—It’s About Leading the Team (Even with AI in the Room)
The arrival of AI doesn’t change the most critical role of a product leader: inspiring, supporting, and guiding your team. If anything, AI highlights the need for strong leadership even more. While AI can take over repetitive tasks like data entry, document creation, and certain types of analysis, it can’t replace the human connection that drives great teamwork.
Product leadership is rooted in vision, and while AI can help gather data or predict trends, it’s the leader’s job to set the course. Vision isn’t just about what the product will be—it’s about aligning your team to create something bigger together. As AI accelerates execution, leaders need to focus more than ever on empathy—understanding not just the technical work your team does, but the emotional work as well.
Pro Tip: Next time you’re in a meeting, focus on leading with empathy. AI might streamline tasks, but it won’t tell you how your team feels or what they need to thrive. Are you giving your team the space to express themselves, and are you listening before making decisions?
2. AI Won’t Hire for You—Culture Still Comes First
In Product Leadership, one of the key insights is that great teams come from great hiring, not just skill but fit. AI might assist in candidate filtering or help analyze hiring data, but it won’t tell you who will align with your culture.
Hiring is still about people, values, and culture. As product leaders, we need to continue prioritizing those human traits that drive team cohesion and collaboration. AI can help you shortlist candidates or automate parts of the hiring process, but your culture—the shared beliefs and values that unify your team—remains your responsibility.
Pro Tip: When hiring, use AI as a tool to help sort through resumes or analyze candidate data. But spend just as much time evaluating how well candidates align with your team’s culture. Ask questions like, “How do you handle conflicts in a team?” or “What motivates you to collaborate with others?”
3. Storytelling Will Always Be the Most Powerful Tool
No matter how advanced AI becomes, one skill remains irreplaceable: storytelling. AI can gather insights, analyze trends, and even generate data-driven recommendations, but it can’t inspire a team with vision or connect emotionally with customers. Product leaders need to be able to translate data into stories that move people to action.
As a product leader, it’s your job to frame your product vision not just with logic but with heart. Tell the story of where your customers are, where they need to go, and how your product will get them there. With AI handling more data and routine work, leaders now have more time to focus on crafting those narratives that get teams aligned and excited.
Pro Tip: Use AI to gather and analyze the data you need, but don’t let it take over your role as the storyteller. Next time you present a product update, frame it as a story—explain the customer problem, the impact of the solution, and why it matters to the team.
4. AI Helps You Balance Strategy with Execution
One of the biggest challenges product leaders face is balancing big-picture strategy with the day-to-day execution. AI can take over some of the operational burden—automating tasks, organizing data, and flagging key insights. This frees leaders to spend more time on high-level strategy and decision-making.
But beware of becoming too detached. Even though AI is handling much of the grunt work, product leaders still need to be plugged into the details. AI might automate routine tasks, but it’s up to you to ensure those tasks align with your long-term strategy. You need to bridge the gap between data-driven insights and human-driven execution.
Pro Tip: Use AI to handle the repetitive parts of your workflow, but stay engaged in how your team is executing. Review the work regularly, not to micromanage, but to ensure it’s in line with the bigger strategy.
5. AI Can’t Innovate—But It Can Create Space for Innovation
Innovation thrives in a culture that encourages experimentation and takes calculated risks. AI can’t replace that spirit of creative exploration, but it can create the space for it. By automating mundane or repetitive tasks, AI gives your team more room to innovate, experiment, and test new ideas.
Product leaders need to harness this opportunity by cultivating a culture where risk-taking is rewarded and failure is seen as a learning experience. By freeing designers, engineers, and PMs from time-consuming, low-value tasks, AI enables teams to focus on the work that really moves the needle: problem-solving, customer feedback, and qualitative interviews.
Pro Tip: Set aside dedicated time for innovation in your team’s workflow. With AI handling the busywork, encourage your team to use that extra time to experiment, test new ideas, and take creative risks.
Final Thoughts: Product Leadership in the Age of AI
AI is changing how product teams operate, but the core principles of product leadership remain the same. It’s still about leading people, crafting vision, and fostering a culture of trust and collaboration. AI can help product teams work more efficiently by automating tasks that drain time and energy, but it’s the human element that will always drive innovation, creativity, and impact.
In the age of AI, great product leaders won’t just focus on the technical side of the product—they’ll focus on the human side. They’ll use AI to optimize execution, but their greatest focus will be on leading people, telling stories, and creating cultures where innovation thrives.